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Yard Art that Works

© Carol Wallace

A garden should be, of course, whatever the gardener can make of it, and this is (as a rule) not much. But it is more important for the gardener to be enchanted than for critics to be pleased.
  Henry Mitchell The Essential Earthman, p. 69

Some of us are lucky enough - and sure enough of ourselves - to place whatever pleases us in our gardens, not caring what others might think. But in many of us there is that slight uneasiness that starts when someone asks to see the garden. And suddenly the stone hedgehog half-hidden under the hosta worries us - does he make us seem a bit naive? Suddenly we half-wish that our child's garden didn't have so quite many plastic frogs. Someone might think they are ours!

I hadn't realized how universal this fear was until I was visiting a garden last week. It was a display garden at one of my favorite places to shop - Vilenicki - An Herb Farm. The gift shop at this farm sells many really beautiful garden ornaments - and some that the real purist might call tacky. I like and would like to own almost all of them. The owner, Gerry Janus, also loves them - the difference is that she does own many of them and often uses them in her gardens. Uses them very well, I might add.

That's why I was startled when, as I was walking out of the gift shop with my brand new gazing ball stand in tow, she asked me, "How many gazing balls can you have in your garden before it's tacky?" (And she didn't even know about our contest!)

I should add that the photo at the left was taken at Vilenicki, but the gazing balls are part of the store display and not part of the garden decor. So all I really had to do was point at them to indicate an answer of sorts. En masse like this, there are far too many - but distributed throughout the gardens, as Gerry has them, they look quite nice.

She admits to having five gazing balls - but I only found two on my tour of the grounds - they are so nestled in among greenery that they are almost an illusion. "Not tacky," I assured her.

Gerry went on, gesturing to a "cat" garden full of catnip and catmint and pussytoes and pussy willow and other cat plants. "Are there too many cats in that garden?" she asked me. I saw a stone sleeping cat lying in the mulch, stretching out toward the nepeta, as if the very scent had put her into a noontime stupor. Across the bed an upright cat perched under a birdhouse, looking nonchalant, pretending to be otherwise occupied. I almost missed the third cat - a tiny one perched behind a stone, peering in as though wondering if it could play, too.

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