Holly Solano
Adams County Master Gardener
(6/9) Spring is upon us, and between rain showers the outdoors is a balmy place to be. Many of us have begun our outdoor garden rhythms, too, which includes a lot of work prepping and cleaning and planting for the new season. This year, why not enjoy your garden as much as work in it? Take time to enjoy the arts in your garden. It can help you acquire your vitamin D (during moderate sun exposure), aid with healing and dissipating stress, enjoy and appreciate the fruits of your garden labor, and make memories with garden visitors.
How might you enjoy art in the garden? Theater, dance, textile arts, visual arts, and music can all be enjoyed and enhanced in a garden. If you do not have your own garden, perhaps you have a neighbor with a lovely garden who would not mind sharing an art-related event or experience.
Drama and Dance
There is drama everywhere in the garden if you are interested in looking. Pull up a chair or walk around slowly, and you will be amazed at the scenes unfolding all around you. Predators hunting prey, prey evading predators, mating dances, pollinators working and communicating, animals and insects raising their babies and playing, all can be observed in every garden space.
Looking for drama of the more human kind? Hang up a shower curtain rod or a broomstick, rake handle, even a long branch between two trees or large shrubs. Hang a sheet or shower curtain on it and you have an instant stage for reading lines, acting out skits, or performing moonlight dances. You can add to the theater effect at night with a row of stage lights to the front of the garden stage. Just be sure to use solar-powered flashlights, pathway lights, or luminaries to avoid the fire hazard of costumes and props catching fire.
Visual Arts
Gardens offer many opportunities for budding and avid artists and photographers. Look closely, and you will discover a myriad of textures and colors worth framing, painting, drawing, and capturing. Using your camera phone on portrait or macro mode can help you create some breathtaking photos of micro-sized miracles in the garden. It is a centuries-old tradition for painters to paint outdoors, or en plien air. Stock an old first aid kit or pencil box with a small sketch book, pencils, small brushes, a tiny bottled water, and a small watercolor paint tin, and you can be ready to be inspired in under 30 seconds.
Do not overlook the potentially calming experience of crafting, knitting, weaving or floral arranging while in a garden space. Just pop up a folding table and a chair (and possibly an umbrella). Try creating garden sculptures (fabric dipped in concrete is fun) or pollinator houses for display in your garden.
Gardens have long been a source for fiber arts. Many garden plant materials are made into dyes for silk, wool, and cotton yarns, ribbons, and fabrics. Onion skins, nut hulls, flowers, grasses, cabbage, and beets are popular dyestuffs. If creating plant dyes does not appeal to you, perhaps try making a pounded flower print in the ancient tradition of Japanese tatakizome. The basic concept is to arrange plants on a clean sheet of durable white paper or fabric. Then you add some extra layers of paper and pound with a hammer or mallet until the plant pigments have transferred to the paper/fabric.
Music
Garden have built-in live music performances! Birds, pollinators, frogs, crickets, wind, and other sounds create rhythms and music for those who are willing to stop a moment and listen. You can provide your own music by adding wind chimes to a garden space. If you have friends or budding musicians who play the guitar, drums, or other portable instrument, consider having a concert in the garden. If you are more of an introvert who flies solo, listen to your favorite playlist or make your own music in the quiet solitude among the plants.
Gardens also supply many materials for making musical instruments. Seeds, stones, grasses, bark, and sticks can be fashioned into drums, rattles, shakers, whistles and flutes.
Your garden plants will benefit from music, too. Studies show that sound waves stimulate nutrients to move through plant cells, promoting new growth and strengthening their immune systems. Studies even indicate that plants seem to have a specific taste in music.
Public Gardens
You can also cultivate creativity in a public garden. We live in a perfect central starting point for public gardens to the east, west, and south of us: The U.S. Arboretum, National Conservatory, and the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and the Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland are all less than two hours away. If you want to be well rewarded for a bit longer drive, go west to the Arboretum at Penn State or go east to Philadelphia and visit Longwood Gardens, Morris Arboretum, Fairmount Park, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Terraced Sculpture Garden. Just remember; when visiting public gardens, do not remove any plant materials.
Whether you choose to experiment with theater, dance, visual arts, or music, cultivating creativity in a garden can increase your enjoyment of a garden space beyond just working and harvesting in it.
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