Garden Art means different things to different people.

In the vegetable garden it can take the form of a screen to mask the compost bin, or a painting on the side of the tool shed. Some of us – and by us I mean gardeners – take care to lay out our herb gardens to create patterns that please the eye. Then we add decorative elements that bring us joy or remind us where the time has flown.

Herbs join flowers, ceramic fish, and a sun-dial in this garden in Santa Fe, NM

Most of the time garden art means a sculptural element that we add to gardens as focal points, as whimsical elements, to make statements, or as mementoes. Focal points work especially well when space is limited and the city encroaches just outside the garden walls.

Alert to the urban sounds just beyond the fence, bronze deer bring a welcome reminder of the natural world to a pocket garden in Portland, OR.

Focal points also serve to draw us along the garden path, sometimes giving us pleasant surprises.

We take a turn around a newly-installed garden in Port Ludlow, WA where a civic-minded resident transformed his empty lot into an informal neighborhood park.

We appreciate the bold statements some art makes. It draws our attention to elements of the context in which a garden sits, to contributions of indigenous people, to the past from which the garden derives.

The courtyard of a museum in Santa Fe NM reminds us of the cultural context from which much of the art and gardens of New Mexico grow.

Whimsy plays a vital role in the choice of garden art. It brings magic and mystery to gardens, and enhances the joy of growing flowers, herbs, and trees.

There be dragons among the gaillardia, yarrow, rosemary, and apples in this Santa Fe, NM garden.

But I think we love it best when the garden is the art and its plants serve as sculpture, form, and function. David and I designed the informal park in Port Ludlow I mentioned above. It is such a delight to take a blank slate and transform earth and light, soil and water into a lovely place to be.

We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details. If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know.

As many of you may realize by now, while David and I are avid gardeners, our passion is the gateway to nature that the garden provides. As we arrive in New Mexico, so does spring, with all its chaotic and unpredictable weather. Red buds bloom along with plums, lilacs, and cottonwood. And then it snows, and gardeners and farmers worry about their incipient apricots, cherries, and apples.

As I look out the window, reluctant to venture out into the chilly morning, I muse about the birds that flit among the branches of street trees. Barely visible as they industriously seek their morning fare, I wonder how the birds passed the cold night. Have they built nests and laid eggs yet?  My mind meanders to thoughts of Birds and Their Trees.

It seems to me that birds have a very intimate relationship with trees. Trees provide home, security, and often, food. As we travel down the west coast on our book tour, we encounter cormorants nesting in Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) at Pismo Beach on the California Coast. In all the years I have watched cormorants carrying on – in Baja California, in the Pacific Northwest, in Alta California, and even in the bosque along the Rio Grande – I have never seen a nesting colony. We are enchanted. I enjoy the irony that the birds have chosen a semi-urban setting to raise their babies.

In Arizona, as we make our way toward New Mexico, we stop for a late picnic. In the quiet, not too far from the less-traveled blue highway, birds rustle the grasses. We hold still, wondering what might appear. A flicker of brown wings. I slowly raise my binoculars, while David brings his camera to his eye. A bird bursts from the grass and alights in a cholla cactus (Opuntia sp). We are well-acquainted with this bird – a cactus wren – whose life revolves around the sustenance that the cactus provides.

When we cross the border into New Mexico, we are enveloped by an oak-pine forest. Taking a short hike off the road we stop to enjoy the peace of an oak woodland (Quercus emoryi). The leaves twitch with life, but we are not sure what we’ve seen. A flash of blueish gray. A beady eye. A flutter of wings as the bird lands to get a better look at us. This Mexican Jay proves to be a people watcher. Perhaps others have shared their picnic with him. I snap his picture before he tires of us. What is his relationship with the oak? I am sure the Jay loves its acorns. Does he nest among its leafy branches as well?

We pass through the Gila National Forest and we stop at a favorite birding spot. I hear sounds that I recognize. I slice an orange and lay pieces of it on a white-washed stone wall near the trail. We step back into the dense copse. I hold the camera to one eye and watch the forest with the other. We don’t wait long. Our reward for quiet patience arrives. Warily, the Gila Woodpecker approaches the orange slices. He is vigilant in case this is a trap. I snap his picture and he hears the shutter. He pecks the orange slice, and then disappears into the forest. What bird has a more intimate relationship with trees than a woodpecker?

Trees form the backbone of our gardens. They provide the skeletal structure, and these bones invite wildlife to visit. These wild creatures provide invaluable services. Birds, for instance, provide insect control and fertilizer. And if we, in turn, offer shelter and food, we stand to make great gains.  We help create healthy habitat; we defragment the eco-system in which we reside, no matter where that is; and we heal our relationship with the natural world.

Do you have a story of trees or birds to share? We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details. If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know.

San Diego, CA – We visit the San Diego Botanical Garden, in Encinitas, where we find many treasures including a small Permaculture Demonstration Garden. Permaculture, a concept developed originally by Bill Mollison of Australia, is a contraction of “Permanent and Agriculture”. It is a very rich system that stresses the use of perennial rather than annual plants, and employs many techniques that can be put into practice in small suburban lots as well as on large farms.

The Botanical Garden has a great example of a “keyhole” garden. The keyhole design, a Permaculture concept, features a single path leading to a central circle with shorter spokes of smaller paths radiating out from the center like petals on a flower. This design makes the entire planted area accessible from a single pathway, maximizing the planting area available for both edible and ornamental crops. Vegetables, flowers, and herbs are interplanted in a polyculture mix that helps to discourage insect pests and fungal diseases. Polycultures work because no plant’s nearest neighbor is the same as itself. This helps to prevent an insect pest or a fungal pathogen from leapfrogging from one plant to the next and wreaking havoc throughout your garden.

We also seize the opportunity to visit one of the “Edible Schoolyard” programs in the area at Cardiff Elementary School in Cardiff-by-the-Sea near Encinitas. Edible Schoolyards, a movement cfreated by Alice Waters of Berkely restaurant Chez Panise fame, is a national program for developing food production systems in local schools where kids can learn a variety of skills in addition to learning how to grow food. Cardiff Elementary received a generous grant from the Rob Machado Foundation for their garden. The grant funds allowed them to update the main garden site, including new equipment, irrigation system, and signage. The kids developed a “school-to-restaurant” pilot program. Students selected what to grow based on which crops a restaurant actually used. They harvested vegetables such as lettuce, carrots, and radishes, along with edible flowers and sold them to a local restaurant.

We also make two bookstore appearances in the San Diego area. The staff at Warwick’s, in La Jolla, are eager to share the book with their customers. We describe how we developed the book, and then hold a plant clinic at which we diagnose some plant problems that attendees have brought in. This is a lively group who really enjoys choosing their own adventure, as they use the diagnostic flow charts in the book. We look at the symptoms, answer the questions in the flow charts, and pretty soon we solve the mystery. These folks are not surprised to learn that becoming a plant detective is really fun.

In Coronado we’re at Bay Books, where people line up with baggies full of bits of plants in trouble for us to look at and help them figure out what has gone wrong. We use our book and show them how simple it is to discover the answer to their problems. And then we show them how to find a safe organic solution to fix the problem.

If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know. We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details (www.ddandkw.com/events)