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The Artful Garden – Finding Design Inspiration in Art, Music and Dance

Oct, 2012
by Andrea Nilsen Morse
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The Artful Garden, a beautiful and thoughtful book by James Van Sweden, explores how and where we find inspiration for creating art.  Van Sweden views garden design as an art form, and gives examples of how painting, sculpture, music and dance can provide inspiration for garden design.

Van Sweden is particularly known for his painterly approach to plant design.  Using large swaths of plants as he would broad brush strokes on canvas;  and with an eye toward the use of color, light and shadow, he creates gardens that are inspired by and conversely inspire, landscape paintings.

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Evening Island at the Chicago Botanic Garden, by Van Sweden, shows off his painterly approach to plant design

Throughout the book, Van Sweden draws analogies between garden design and other art forms.  One of the most interesting concepts (I think) is the relationship between music and garden design.  The idea is that music evokes mood; it can make you feel exuberant, contemplative, energized, relaxed, anxious, spiritual, nostalgic or a number of other emotions.  Similarly, a well designed garden can evoke all of those same moods.

In The Artful Garden, Van Sweden interviews cellist Yo Yo Ma, and designer Julie Moir Messervey who collaborated to create the Toronto Music Garden, inspired by Bach’s Suite #1 for unaccompanied cellists.  http://www.toronto.ca/parks/featured-parks/music-garden/  The garden has six “rooms”, each interpreting one of the six movements of Bach’s piece.  He shares their amazing discussion of how they interpreted the feeling of the music into the design of this garden.  I’m going to plan a trip to Toronto next summer just to see this amazing space!

Van Sweden also considers dance as a source of inspiration for garden design.  While art forms such as painting and sculpture may share more evident similarities with garden design (the use of color, form, texture and composition), its dance that uses the dimensions of space and time to tell a story.  Both dance, and gardens, are about the journey and movement through space.  
Lawrence Halprin’s stream at Letterman Drive.  Halprin was known to be influenced by his wife Ann, a dancer, and this stream, as it winds and straightens, speeds up and slows down, was inspired by her love of  dance.
In an interview with the famous landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, before his death, Van Sweden asked about the inspiration he drew from his wife, Ann, a dancer.   He responded “in a sense, all my designs have to do with movement through space, and I think of the design of the landscape that way always, as places in which people move and have their being.”

For me, I think its this analogy, between dance and garden design, that is the most thought provoking.  If you’re a creative type, or are interested in art (of any form) The Artful Garden is both a fascinating and visually stunning book. 


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