Features Column
Final touches
Garden Muse • Delightful art on display at tour of 10 professionally designed gardens
Jill Torberson’s metal scuplture gives interesting contrast of line and form to the garden’s greenery.
Victor Fitzsimons
There may come a time in the process of making your garden when you sense that something’s missing.
Although there are plenty of flowers and leaves, enough canopy to give your garden a feeling of shelter, places to sit and reflect — and perhaps some water — the garden still feels unfinished.
You’ll visit other gardens that seem more complete. You’ll notice a lovely gate, a fence with fancy finials or some beautifully crafted metal obelisks. Perhaps a goddess head peeks out from the trunk of a tree or some blown glass ornaments glitter in the midst of the greenery.
That’s when you wake up to garden art and begin to feel the urgent need to bring it into your own garden.
But first, take some time to study satisfying gardens and see how art best embellishes a site — when sculpture fits into the landscape seamlessly as opposed to looking like it’s been plunked down without any connection to the living palette.
Ideally, the art and the plants complement each other like partners in a good marriage, contrasting with each other yet also connecting so there’s a unified picture.
The Behind-the-Scenes Garden Tour on June 27 (www.anld.com) is a perfect opportunity to see how this is accomplished. Professional garden designers and artists have collaborated in 10 beautiful gardens in the Eastmoreland and Northeast Portland areas.
I spoke with several of the artists to learn more about their particular passions.
Art inspired by nature
Besides working full time and caring for her own garden, Ann Murphy creates mosaic art to embellish other peoples’ gardens. Ever since she was a child she’s painted, done needlepoint and mosaic art.
“Playing with colors and textures is natural, but the inspiration of Mother Nature makes things so much easier,” she says.
Images of ferns, leaves and koi ripple through her work. She incorporates pearls, agates, glass beads and stained glass that she hand cuts — her pieces sparkle with color and light.
“I love oak leaves, so I created a stepping stone with an oak leaf motif, and an obelisk with spring and fall oak leaves on it,” she says.
Murphy also creates garden spheres with bowling balls.
“A friend brought me three. I fill up the holes, rough up the surface and wait for inspiration to strike. I wander out in the yard for ideas,” she says.
Right now, she’s decorating a chimney pot with a fern motif. “I start pulling glass and colors together, playing with the textures and trying to get some contrast,” she says.
To represent fiddlehead ferns, she’s using different shades of blue-green and yellow-green stained glass, with a contrasting background of orange-red.
“It’s probably going to be heartbreaking when somebody buys it. I could use it in my garden happily,” she says.
A sense of whimsy
It’s hard not to smile when you see Michelle C. Gallagher’s ceramic sculpture (www.TheFunnyThing.com), especially what she calls the “man in the moon garden heads.”
“The man in the moon fell to earth and landed in my garden,” she says.
Quirky heads of birds, kittens, dogs and owls are some of her other ornaments that could rest easily amid the garden’s ground covers for a touch of whimsy. I fell in love with the “Sirens of Lorelei,” birdbath where five women’s faces look out from the pedestal.
Gallagher’s repertoire is wide and includes evocative guardian figures, children and more abstract columns faceted like basalt.
Metal art for the garden
“I always liked fire and sparks. When I was a kid, the other kids called me the ‘firecracker girl'. I still to this day love fire and have turned that into a medium for artistic expression,” says metal artist Jill Torberson (www.WeldMetalworks.com).
It all began when she worked at Bridgeport Brewery and watched welders building all sorts of things out of steel. Recognizing a practical application for her love of fire, she took a welding class, bought tools and started on her path.
Torberson makes gates, fences, trellises and sculpture, mainly from recycled material. “I strive for balance in an abstract format. The most frequent comment about my work is that it’s musical. It has a sense of motion,” she says.
That’s no accident, as Torberson plays French horn in five orchestras. Ever since childhood she’s played music, starting with trumpet, and has loved to sit and draw.
“For me, these things are like breathing,” she says.
You can reach Barbara Blossom Ashmun at gardens@portlandtribune.com.
Coming events
• Behind-the-Scenes Garden Tour, showcasing 10 professionally designed gardens with garden art, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 27. Tickets are $20 and available online at www.anld.com, and at Cornell Farms, Garden Fever and Portland Nursery; proceeds benefit scholarship programs at Clackamas and Portland Community colleges.
• Simplify Your Garden, Barbara Blossom Ashmun gives tips on planting easier care shrubs and reducing fussier plants. She will also read her newly published story How the Garden Saved My Life and sign copies of Married to My Garden; Saturday June 27, at 10 a.m., Al’s Garden Center, 16920 SW Roy Rogers, Sherwood, Free admission, no registration required. For more information, call 503-726-1162.