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Art in the Garden

© Diana Pederson

Once in a while I find a purely fun garden book. If you enjoy light-hearted reading about gardening, you should read Jennifer Isaacs' book, Quirky Gardens. Published by Ten Speed Press in 1995, Isaacs shows many garden styles from her native Australia. If nothing else, this book will make you chuckle. The main subject of the book is the use of sculptures, and recyclable objects as art in the garden. It definitely is not a book about garden plants all though the art is surrounded by plants.

A wide range of possibilities are presented ranging from the traditional sculptures to recycling milk pails into garden art. You'll find several gardens with miniature buildings and appropriate size landscaping. Still others have garden walls made of throw-away objects that have been cemented into a wall. Can't you just see someone creating a garden wall by cementing out-dated computers together? Just glancing through this book will present ideas for the use of broken dishes, whole dishes, sea shells, or simply multi-colored stones as garden art. You'll find many landscaping ideas such as sculpture in the middle of cactus gardens.

One set of pictures that really touched me as something that many people would like to do consists of memorials to pets. Most were created from cement figures which were painted in appropriate colors for the departed pets. I can easily see someone with an extensive garden working in small memorials of this type to honor their departed animals.

Since the material in this book is from Australia, I can't help but wonder about building laws in that nation. Although many original ideas exist here for adventurous gardeners, I am afraid many of our cities or towns would ban such things as walls between yards created by cementing trash together! Perhaps a gardener living in the country with no neighbors for miles around could get away with this! Other ideas, such as small villages, could easily be created in a backyard and shouldn't be objectionable to neighbors.

This is a well written, easy to read book. I recommend it to anyone who wants some creative garden art ideas or who just wants to see some of the strangest garden art on earth! It'll make you giggle with delight! It is virtually impossible to describe this book in mere words. I struggled to find words to give you a sense of what this book is like: unique, extraordinary, delightful, cute, unusual, surprising, and their synonyms are inadequate to describe these wonderful garden creations. It makes me wish Americans would experiment more with folk art in the garden.

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