Home-Grown Art

Here is an online link to this week's Top 5 Home & Garden Events listing on page 25 of today's print edition in the Washington Examiner. This being a holiday weekend, local events were spotty, but we featured the funky art exhibit at the Adkins Arboretum. I'm starting to really get into these landscape art installations. In my own yard I've created a faerie glen of sorts (pictured here) and am starting to work with dried branches of curly willow and bamboo to form visual barriers and gateways between separate garden rooms.

One of the talks I went to at APGA had W. Gary Smith, an artist/landscape architect, present his current "Art Goes Wild" installation at New England Wild Flower Society in Framingham, MA. Have to say his talk was one of the few there I took any notes on -- love his ideas and I shouldn't have been surprised that he is also the genius behind the best children's garden I've ever visited -- the Enchanted Woods at Winterthur. He designed it for "kids 35 years and older." And he hit that target right on the mark. I'm planning a return trip up there in nearby Delaware as last summer I did not get to stay half as long as I'd have liked too during the Garden Writers conference.