Dot Bunn
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
by Derek Fell
Throughout history artists have been drawn to gardens in search of stimulating motifs. Some have even planted gardens to paint, including Renoir, Cezanne and Monet among the great French Impressionist artists. Indeed, all three of their gardens have been restored and are now open to the public: Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence; Cezanne at Aix-en-Provence; and Monet at Giverny, Normandy. What is fascinating to me is the way in which their gardens differ even though they were linked by the Impressionistic style of painting.
Monet’s is the most ambitious, consisting of a flower garden composed of straight plant bands to give it long lines of perspective, and a separate water garden, designed for introspection, where islands of water lilies float on the surface of a pond. Renoir, a close friend of Monet, developed a meadow garden within a grove of ancient olive trees and a separate rose garden inter-planted with citrus trees. Cezanne’s garden is all shade with paths that zigzag among mature pines, mock orange shrubs with their multiple trunks pruned of lower branches to create leafy tunnels, and large sycamores cloaked in ivy. His favorite motif was nature reclaiming man’s dominion, and that is how his garden is clearly an extension of his art: deliberately intended to look overgrown and reverting to wilderness.
My own garden, Cedaridge Farm, draws inspiration from Cezanne in that when I make a new planting I let nature take its course because I want to see a naturalistic effect rather than something engineered by man. Jessie Krause, owner of Netherfield Gallery, Frenchtown and a prolific artist, says that is exactly what draws her to my garden to paint. “It doesn’t have that manufactured feeling like Longwood Gardens. It doesn’t look designed. It looks as if it just happened.”
The observation pleases me immensely because my garden serves as an outdoor studio for my photography and like Cezanne I want to see my garden reverting to wilderness rather than evoke a controlled “just planted” appearance.
Jessie says she likes coming to my garden to paint because it is private, screened from the road by trees so she feels like she is in an intimate space: safe, secure and protected, and closer to nature than she could be in a public park or even along the Delaware River towpath. That’s what I like to hear because I look on my garden as a sanctuary, a sacred space to feed the soul and feel close to nature.
To finish reading about artistic inspiration in the garden, turn to page 52 in Fall 2015 Issue of Bucks County Magazine.