Roberto Burle Marx, Adrian Berg, Edouard Vuillard, Katherine Swift, and Marilyn Krysl
Roberto Burle Marx was a Brazilian landscape designer, plant collector, and artist. He painted, sculpted, and designed tapestries but is best known for his work designing parks, gardens, and the Copacabana promenade on Avenida Atlantica. Hoping to preserve Amazonian flora, he brought back plants to be propagated in the greenhouses surrounding his home. He created a lush garden there and, after his death, Sitio Roberto Burle Marx was donated to the Brazilian government. Two artists who painted public gardens were Adrian Berg and Edouard Vuillard. Enamored with Monet's practice of dedicating a series of works to one subject, Berg spent decades painting aspects of Regent Park in London throughout the changing seasons. Vuillard made sketches, paintings, and panels depicting Place Vintimille, a busy square close to his apartment. Some public gardens have had an outsized influence on my appreciation of gardens. One of the world's best collection of cacti is part of the Huntington Botanical Gardens, which includes many mature specimens from Baja California, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the California deserts, South America, the Canary Islands, and Madagascar, along with South African succulents. Palms and cycads, camelias, roses, and a Japanese garden are some of the other collections with Australian, subtropical, and jungle as the newer gardens. Designed by Antonio Gaudi, Parq Guell is a mix of whimsical buildings and structures located in Barcelona. Its curving benches covered with colorful broken ceramic pieces inspired my first stamps. Seattle Japanese Garden reveals not only the aesthetic of Japanese gardens but also serves as a reminder of the influence that Japanese gardeners have had on private gardens on the West Coast. Both the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver B.C. and the J. Paul Getty Museum in southern California provide the luxury of walking through a large expanse of varied plantings, with the added pleasure of being able to move from outdoors into art exhibits and back again at the museum. What gardens have a special resonance for you? In The Morville Hours, Katherine Swift describes her late summer garden's "golden light, like a rich old Sauternes, full and sweet. Sugars caramelize in the leaves—tones of butterscotch, cinder toffee, treacle tart; quince paste, marmalade, toffee apple; Beaujolais, cassis, Lynch-Bages." In her book The Discovery of Poetry, Frances Mayes points out the pleasures of naming things. As an example, she includes Marilyn Krysl's poem "Saying Things." In one section of the poem Krysl asks you to "Say eye, say shearwater, alewife, apache, harpoon, do you see what I'm saying, say celery, say Seattle, say a whole city, say San Jose." She ends her poem by writing that saying words adds "a shimmer and the bird song of its sound...." Which words appeal to you? "The Back Garden" was written for the trees that were cut down to clear the land for development behind my garden. The Morville Hours was published in Britain by Bloomsbury in 2008 and in the United States in 2009 by Walker and Company. The Discovery of Poetry was originally published by Harcourt Brace and a later paperback edition was published by Harvest in 2001.
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AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
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