SOUTHLAND

- Why gardeners are also creators.

Arenovated metal pedal car was painted with ladybirds, butterfly cocoons and wildflowers. A tin tub toy box was transformed to look like an ocean-going ship, complete with anchors and foamy wake. Many other unlikely but memorable, cheerful artistic statements brought me as much joy from painting them as it did my children from living with them.

Those somewhat garish (I’m colour-blind) painted surfaces still grace our home all these years later, enjoyed now by my grandchildren who weren’t there back then for the painstaking application of the paint, but still get to rattle around in the car, fall asleep looking at the ceiling and haul toys from the tin ship.

Nowadays, my artistic endeavours are almost all centred on my gardens. I use the plural, as I’ve more than one garden to be creative in: my forest-garden, along with a community garden in the village, a wetland reserve on the edge of the estuary, a heritage orchard one street across, and one or two other shared planting projects dotted about the district.

In many ways, I regard them as I did the ceiling, pedal car and toy box of yester-year – they’re opportunities to create and craft pleasing experiences for my children, their children and those of anyone who might visit those treed spaces.

Garden art of the sort that uses plants as the medium is a subtle form of creativity. For one thing, it’s outside and subject to tough conditions – sun that would fade, wind that would destroy (think trampoline), rain and hail that would erode paint as well as rot carved wood.

Plants though, are up to the challenge of the elements and self-repair. They constantly keep your artistic creations fresh and new, as the seasons turn. Unlike regular toys, it doesn’t matter if children leave garden art out in the rain, nor can they lose their garden, its climbing trees, winding paths and hidey holes.

Artworks with these elements of tree and vine, shrub, flowers, fruits and fungi do need on-going maintenance – clipping, planting, manuring and watering – but those tasks double as exercise and therapy for parents and grandparents, keeping the artists flexible and sane.

Where gardens excel and make other forms of artistic expression seem very pedestrian, is that they contribute immediately to their own development. They increase in beauty and complexity as soon as the artist lays down the foundations in the form of tiny plants. The garden, with its canvas of living soil, takes the meagre offerings from the artist-gardener and makes something far, far more wonderful from them than any person could ever do. Saplings swell into towering trees, a bluebell spreads to become a drift, a star-flowered vine drapes the canopy like a night sky.

Creative people – and that’s every one of us – working with living plants can move beyond the category of artist, and become, well, creators, with a lower-case “c”. Our creations self-repair and balance out wherever we make mistakes or fall short with our vision. A broken branch will sprout and grow on, no glue or touch up required. Any bare patch in the garden will self-fill; perhaps with plants not of your choosing, but repair nevertheless.

My grandchildren don’t know or care that I think of myself as an artist, my garden as a canvas and plants as water colours, oils and acrylics. They simply enjoy my rather wild and unruly masterpieces and don’t worry about smudging or breaking them, as they might if I’d taken to charcoal-sketching or pastels.

When my children were young, I painted the ceiling of the boys’ bedroom with a night sky, complete with nebula, planets, moons and whizzing asteroids.