Make your garden landscape into your personal Artistic Masterpiece.

This answer is more inspirational than practical. It is about rethinking your relationship with the landscape. How to free up and integrate your most creative impulses onto your garden canvas. Maintenance? Hmmm. Rethink that word. I like caretaking better. And the best way to take care of something or someone is to love it. As I think about it… this adaptation has become, perhaps, the most important lesson I have learned in my adult life. I have had several influencers, who changed my way of thinking. In doing so, they have made me the peculiar old lady I am today and helped me transform my property into my masterpiece.

My greatest influence came from my mother—a farmer’s daughter who transformed spaces with artistic flair and constant attention. Jane Andrews’s gardens were a highlight of the Beverly Hills Garden Walk, rich in variety, swirling in multilayers of color and texture. As a child, I did not understand what my mother got out of it. So much work—sun up to sun down, spring into fall, without pay. Relatively few people saw our gardens, except during the Garden Walks and a few parties. And yet she seemed so satisfied with herself and her efforts for as long as she lived.

Wildflower Artistry: Urban to Rural Transitions

After I bought my properties my passion spawned, slowly, and grew. I met Chapman Kelley when I was in charge of promoting the conservation concepts of the Lakefront Partnership. Kelley became notorious for his Wildflower Works in Grant Park and sued the city of Chicago to get federal protection for his masterpieces. He taught me to appreciate native plants and wildflowers, and to rebalance the ecosystem, although I never became as rigorous in the discipline as he and his disciples. I came to see my works, and my mother’s, as art, an expression of exuberance and love. Priceless, literally

His technique used in Grant Park was to cut out giant ellipses and plant thousands of wildflowers. See two ellipses in the urban setting below. I moved from this great city to a wooded mountain valley many years ago. I spoke to Kelley midway through my creative process and showed him some of my works in process. I had adapted my approach, obviously, for a much smaller scale, cutting ellipses and amoebas, seeding wildflowers, and then integrating more native and found materials, like so:

Kelley’s native plants

Kelley gave me credit for my style of creating garden masterpieces. Here is my field of penstemon mixed with vetch and other wildflowers, similar to Kelley’s ideal using native plants. Ok. That’s nice. My style has evolved to integrate found objects, rocks, natural elements, and water. I take poor aspects of my property and transform them with sweet surprises. This: In this example, I cut into my poor native “lawn” and carved a spot for this huge driftwood find, then added rusted metal pieces from an abandoned mining area on top of rocks I collect from a mineralized creek. (The stones will hold much of the color as they fade into softer tones I prefer, as shown below:)

This composition started by carving and resituating elements as shown below:

I work with nature, work around the negatives (like my horrible “lawn”) accentuate the positives, and carve niches for creative expression. Sometimes It could appear as simple as this restacking of rocks… into a boy playing ball with his dog. In the above case, I have taken a skull I found on one of our frequent hikes and integrated it into a leaky bird bath in our mixed herb and wildflower cut-out.