Gardening Artists

All gardening is landscape painting. Alexander Pope

Susan Abbott, My Gardens in Summer, photograph

This is the time of year I have a love/hate—with the balance a bit more tipped towards hate—relationship with my garden.

Later in the summer, I will be head over heels besotted with my flowers and vegetables, fruit and herbs, all at their peak of good looks and ripe abundance and providing an endless bounty of delicious meals and beautiful bouquets.

I’ll receive sheer pleasure from the little Eden I’ve created for my family and the birds, butterfly, and insect friends that share the garden with me.

Gustav Klimt, Flower Garden, oil

But right now at the end of May, I find myself resenting my plant obsession and the long hours of physical work it takes to bring to life the vision of abundance I hold in my head.

By the end of a morning of shoveling compost, raking beds, mulching paths, and transplanting the baby sunflowers, melons and lettuces I’ve coddled along from seed, I’ve had it with my gardening love affair.

Camille Pissarro, The Artist’s Garden at Eragny (detail), oil

On a lovely spring afternoon that I could be spending out in the field with my French easel mixing the colors of a sky full of cumulus clouds, I’m shoveling chicken poop on to the cabbage patch.

I ask myself, “Why am I putting all these hours into digging in the dirt and hauling a wheel barrow around the yard when I could be painting? What am I, a menial laborer or an artist?“

The answer, I know, when I’m being honest with myself, is both.

Child Hassam, Celia Thaxter’s Garden, Isle of Shoals, Maine

And the next day when the morning comes, I feel better. I can move again without aches and pains and am ready to head outside in the cool of early morning to dig and plant.

“But just until lunchtime,” I promise, “and then I am going to my studio.”

I tell myself that this intense time of creation in the garden is short and soon I will just be in the maintenance mode of weeding and harvesting and enjoying.

Susan Abbott, Big Harvest (detail), watercolor

I remind myself what the great Pablo Casals said: “I am a human being first, a musician second, a cellist third.”

A human being first, an artist second, a painter third.

For me, part of being a human being means growing some of my own food, partnering with nature, doing physical as well as mental work.

J.E.H. MacDonald, Study for The Tangled Garden, oil

For gardening artists like me, designing with plants is much like designing a painting.

We select our varieties of flowers and even vegetables with an eye towards how their colors, sizes, and textures will interact, how the parts will become a whole.

Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée XVIII, oil

We think of varying textures, of using both complementary and analogous colors, as we select a living palette at the nursery.

Yellow and orange calendulas? Let’s mix in some purple delphiniums and blue bachelor buttons—and the pollinating bees will be happy, too.

Claude Monet, In the Garden, oil

Some artists crave the connection to nature that creating a garden provides.

Painter Alan Gussow was a passionate gardener and environmentalist and he and his wive Joan (who wrote the delightful memoir This Organic Life ) shared a passion for growing as much of their food as possible.

Gussow’s love of the experience of working outdoors among the shapes and colors of the gardens he knew so intimately inspired many of his abstract watercolors and oils.

Alan Gussow, Mulch, watercolor

Emil Nolde and his wife Ada were also passionate gardeners. Nolde painted luminous watercolors inspired by the purity and intensity of the flowers they grew.

After the end of the Nazi rule in Germany which had banned him from exhibiting, Nolde painted bright red poppies to help him get accustomed to using color freely again.

Emile Nolde, Poppies, watercolor

Georgia O’Keefe cultivated a garden at her ranch in Abiquiú that kept her supplied with fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year. She hired gardeners to help but was intimately involved with day to day cultivation, including getting her hands dirty planting peas in the spring.

She felt what she described as “an intimacy with the soil,” and said, “I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then”—a sentiment that I and maybe you can relate to!

Her garden is still in operation years after her death, now as a partnership between the O’Keefe Museum and local schools. Here’s a webcam live stream for you O’Keefe lovers out there.

Georgia O’Keefe, Apple Family, oil

Are you a gardening artist? I’d love to hear how you balance your studio practice with the demands of your garden this busy time of the year.

I’d also be interested in hearing how your art and your garden have influenced each other.

Please feel free to share in the comments below!

Susan Abbott, Artist in the Garden, watercolor