Diary of a Gardener Your Landscape is Artwork

We are all good at different things. While some are beautiful artists, others are handy and resourceful with their hands. One person is perfect for manual labor and others author novels. Each of us brings something valuable to this world. If we were all good at the same things, nothing would get done. It takes all of us to master this earth. I find the act of working with my hands, crafting my garden into an oasis, moving my body, and feeling the sun on my back meditative and an expression of myself. Others may find that work horrid, hard, and back breaking. Back breaking, I will agree with. Hard, yes, it is at times, but never horrid.

My garden and those I design for I see as a canvas needing to be painted. A pop of green over there, a splash of purple here and sprinkled in bits of white, all drawing your eye into the experience of a garden. A garden is meant to be experienced, not looked at. Just this week I was asked to design a pollinator garden for a woman. She also wanted most of her entire back lawn’s landscaping redone. Not a small effort. When I showed her the design, she asked where the pollinator garden was. My reply was the entire landscape is a pollinator garden. Carefully curated in a fun, whimsical, yet uniform and pleasing fashion. Layers and drifts and swaths of plants with one row of shrubs flowing into the next layer and the next. Using mostly Florida native plants and the rest Florida Friendly plants to create color, form, texture yet drawing in our native pollinators to her garden. She wants butterflies and blossoms and an ever-growing array of colors. She wants to walk out her back lanai and investigate the garden and follow the butterfly bouncing around from plant to plant.

My own garden is similar. I want the eye to bounce from one to the next flower. I want your breath to be taken away just as if you were looking at art hanging on the walls of the MET. I want you to stop and look at the flower and the bee buzzing inside the petals or a lizard climbing up the palm tree trunk. I want my garden and everyone’s garden to be artwork painted with Earths’ flowers. I want you to smile when you walk into a garden. It is meant to be enjoyed along with being functional and living out its purpose of making your home more appealing. For many the landscape is an enhancement to a home. For myself, my garden stands on its own. It is its own masterpiece.

So, the next time you think about your landscaping, think about how it will look painted on a canvas. You get to choose your paintbrushes and paint colors. Go paint… I mean plant!