a creative garden
what is a creative garden?
All gardens are creative of course - you can see this by giving a seed water, watching it germinate and grow into a plant. After many growing seasons I still get excited by this process and the sheer range of forms and colours of all the varieties we are lucky enough to have available to us.
But you can also get inspiration and source material from your garden to produce art of every kind.
Drawings, paintings and photographs are what you first think of but there are endless ways a garden can be a source of creativity.
There are so many printing techniques that you can use, as you can see in the examples above, including:
cyanotypes (using the sun)
gel plate printing
monoprinting
thermofax printing
botanical contact printing
There is textile art and embroidery, which can be inspired by plants and also use actual plant material to create it.
There is all that digital has to offer - amazing software that can help you depict images and that can also be combined with physical art. The piece below was made by scanning in some paintings I had done, combining it with photographs in Photoshop, digitally printing it onto fabric, and then free stitching into it on my sewing machine.
The creativity goes the other way too, of course. Bringing an artistic eye to a garden makes you particularly interested in colour and form and how they combine in a flower bed or container. It might make you keen to add art to your garden, whether that’s in the form of a sculpture or an interesting display, or perhaps adding objects that you’ve found on a walk or on a beach.
As well as still photography, you can make videos, even just with footage from your phone and easy to use editing software. Anything, from a time lapse of a plant unfurling, a stop motion animation or a tour of your garden can be made in a creative, artistic way.
