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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2016
PARTING SHOT FROM DANNY MILLER
A weekly snapshot from The Daily Astorian and Chinook Observer photographers
A flock of birds takes flight near the South Jetty of the Columbia River at Fort Stevens State Park in June.
ODDITY
Flower power
Exhibit combines
Impressionist
gardens and
paintings
By KATHERINE ROTH
Associated Press
N
EW YORK — Many
American
painters,
inspired by French
Impressionists at the turn of
the 20th century, locked from
East Coast cities to sun-dap-
pled garden havens in places
like Appledore, Maine; Old
Lyme, Connecticut; and Long
Island’s East End.
The gardens they sought,
known as “grandmother’s gar-
dens,” were utterly unlike the
formal Victorian gardens of
the time. These were homey,
Colonial-era lower gardens,
densely packed with bright
and abundant blooms red and
orange poppies and enormous
peonies in pastel pinks and
purples set against backdrops
of towering blue delphin-
ium, digitalis with their tiny
bell-shaped white and purple
blooms, and yellow sunlow-
ers. The delicate foreground
might include violas, calendu-
las and violet sage.
Grandmother’s
gardens
were designed so that no mat-
ter what season, something
was always blossoming and
bright, with blooms planted
close to houses and porches to
encourage lingering, touching,
tinkering and inhaling.
“Impressionism: Ameri-
can Gardens on Canvas” is a
multi-disciplinary show at the
New York Botanical Garden,
in the Bronx, through Sept. 11.
Along with lowers, it includes
20 Impressionist paintings
inspired by such gardens.
Bold, painterly strokes
Artists featured in the
New York Botanical Garden’s
Rotunda gallery include Wil-
liam Merritt Chase, Childe
Hassam and John Singer Sar-
gent among others. Some of
them gardened, and all were
known for their skill at paint-
ing outdoors and for bold,
painterly brushstrokes.
“The positive reception of
Impressionism in the United
States coincided with a bur-
geoning garden culture, and
these interpretations of well-
tended residential gardens res-
onated with American ideas of
the good life,” said guest cura-
tor Linda S. Ferber, a senior art
historian at the New-York His-
torical Society.
The paintings are easy on
the eyes, she said: “Americans
have always had a sweet spot
for landscape, which carries
many messages about national
and cultural identity. Here, we
can see how deeply enmeshed
in the American psyche gar-
dening was.”
Impressionism was consid-
ered edgy in its day, which was
the same era when the New
York Botanical Garden, now
celebrating its 125th anniver-
sary, was founded, along with
some of the East Coast’s most
famous parks, museums and
gardens.
Public-minded spirit
The paintings, gardens
and optimistic, public-minded
spirit of the time are captured
in two books published to coin-
cide with the show: “Impres-
sionism: American Gardens on
Canvas” (New York Botanical
Garden, 2016), about the fea-
tured painters and paintings;
and “The New York Botani-
cal Garden” (Abrams, 2016),
about the garden’s history.
Preparing for the show
Robert Benson/New York Botanical Garden via AP
A Colonial-era style garden, or “grandmother’s garden,” planted around the facade of a house inside the Botanical
Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory in New York.
William de
Leftwich
Dodge’s
painting
“The
Artist’s
Garden.”
William de
Leftwich
Dodge/
Neville-Strass
Collection/
New York
Botanical
Garden via
AP
Edmund William Greacen/Private Collection/New York Botanical Garden via AP
Edmund William Greacen’s painting “In Miss Florence’s
Garden.”
involved training a dizzying
array of lowers to bloom all
at once for maximum impact.
That took much of the past
three years, numerous green-
houses and the garden’s enor-
mous team of experts, who
grew and trained around
50,000 plants for the exhibit.
“In real life, you would
never see all these lowers
blooming at the same time. It’s
a living work of art, an ideal
garden in perpetuity. So don’t
try this at home,” said Todd A.
Forrest, the garden’s vice pres-
ident for horticulture and liv-
ing collections. “And many
are lowering off-season, so
don’t expect to see them in the
shop.”
Once a week, whole sec-
tions of the garden are
replaced, if needed, so the
display continues to looks
perfect.
“The result is that if you
squint, you should be able to
see a living Impressionist gar-
den,” Forrest said.
A model porch
To put the grandmother’s
garden in context, much of
the exhibit is nestled around a
model porch, the type of archi-
tecture often included in the
backdrop of American Impres-
sionist paintings.
“We invented an Impres-
sionist garden from whole
cloth intimate, comfortable
and colorful, so that walking
through the doors it evokes
the brilliance and boldness
featured in so many Impres-
sionist gardens,” explained
Forrest.
The exhibit is accompanied
by a program of poetry, lec-
tures, tours, music, dance and
even an “1891 Ale House,”
offering snacks and drinks in
keeping with the era.
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