The art of gardening bears a singular attraction for artists, offering a break from indoor studio routines and another outlet for creativity normally channeled into paintings, pots and performances. But as seen in this illustrated tour of the gardens of five area artists and one art conservator, there is plenty of aesthetic and philosophical overlap between their outdoor expressions and their professional productions.
Opening shot provided by artist Warren Rosser; All other photos by Jim Barcus
Warren Rosser’s Armour Hills garden is a quiet rhapsody of colors and textures, assembled with the eye of a veteran painter. Rosser, the William T. Kemper Distinguished Professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, who recently retired as chair of the painting department, has been tending it for 30 years.
“It’s how I was able to keep my sanity during those years of being chair,” Rosser said during a tour last summer. Expertly constructed stone walls, perfectly pruned shrubs, a pebble-lined trough evoking a stream, contribute to a carefully calibrated balance of organic shapes and linear rhythms. Blasts of spiky grasses provide counterpoint. “I like the gesture of these moving stalks in the breeze,” he said.
Rosser has organized the garden as sequence of varied spaces. “It really is like what I do in my painting, organizing spaces and working with surfaces,” he said. “I think about how to create different points of interest.”
Tiny moments of joy abound: the yellow-white leaves of a Japanese maple form a sprinkle of stars against an evergreen backdrop; the scallop-edged leaves of a grouping of coral bells echo the undulating profile of a nearby Hinoki cypress shrub. The mint-green cascade of a centrally placed weeping cypress offers a dramatic anchor. There’s also a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick — a gardener’s favorite for its distinctive corkscrew branches — and a dogwood tree, a gift to his wife, artist Yvonne Rosser, whose eye is represented in the accents provided by pots of colorful flowers.
“Whatever grows” is the gardening motto of Kate Garland, senior conservator of objects at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Roses and vegetables, fruit trees and herbs all grow beautifully in raised beds and terraced plantings around the house she shares with her husband, exhibition designer and vintner Jerry Eisterhold, in rural Platte County, Mo.
Texas wisteria twines over an enclosed deck offering a vista of neat rows of growing grapes. Garland’s garden is an easy-care ramble of texture and color, although she says, “I’m not so concerned about color. I like the sculpture. I’m a sculpture conservator.”
Her goal — to enjoy, rather than fuss — has led her to choose hardy varieties such as Walker’s Low catmint, Powwow pink coneflower and an Oso Easy Paprika shrub rose, with blooms in shades of orange and coral. “It has nice foliage and blooms all summer,” Garland said.
And there are plenty of edibles. Garland plants onions, potatoes, carrots and plenty of herbs — sorrel, and sage, parsley and Thai basil — to season them with. Peach, apricot and pear trees also thrive here, and the couple keeps guinea fowl to control the bugs.
“The monarchs get so greedy in this garden. I’ve seen them chasing birds,” artist Kim Brady Miller remarked during a stroll through her West Side garden of brilliant-colored annuals planted from seed.
The site, adjacent to a building she and her husband, artist and construction specialist D.F. MiIller, bought 23 years ago, became a “gang-owned lot,” Miller said, after the four houses that stood there were torn down. Now it’s a little slice of paradise, with a berm on one side to keep wayward drivers out, and bordered with multicolored zinnias, hardy cosmos, spiky blue salvia and other sun-loving plants known to attract butterflies.
In this respect, an ace performer is Tithonia, or the Mexican sunflower, with a brilliant orange bloom that draws black swallowtail butterflies. “It’s their favorite food,” Miller said. Another standout is Impatiens balsamina. “It’s commonly called balsam or lady’s slipper,” Miller said. “It’s also called touch-me-not or jumping betty because the ripe seed heads burst when they are pinched.”
Woven in among the flowers are selected edibles, including okra and Cherokee Purple tomatoes.
Miller’s daily immersion in this meadow-like setting is an obvious inspiration for the airy organic abstractions she creates in her studio. “They’re a meditation on my surroundings,” she said.
The acre of land surrounding the Merriam house that Christopher Leitch shares with librarian Stuart Hinds offers plenty of scope for enacting his garden philosophy. There’s a “mini-meadow” out front, a “native section,” with Canadian goldenrod, Prairie Dock wildflowers, Turk’s cap lilies and milkweed on the wooded west side, and big flower beds and vegetable plots in the back.
Encompassing a tolerance for chance and the unexpected, and an acknowledgement of people who are dear to him, Leitch’s approach to gardening is very similar to his approach to his well-known “dream drawings.”
“My drawing style features strong outlines, but with uncontrollable stuff happening amidst linear structure,” Leitch said during a tour past huge beds of yellow and purple iris, an enormous plot of peonies, and a veritable field of lilies, including one variety that was a gift from artist Jennie Frederick when Leitch’s father died.
Just as the dream drawings are populated with people he knows and loves, the garden includes many such moments, including a foxtail fern that belonged to his mother. Other nostalgic touches include a grotto with a statue of the Blessed Virgin that Leitch’s mother gave him when he was in college, and an old swing set. “Stuart named it ‘Ruined Childhood,’” Leitch said.
It’s a treat to visit Irma Starr’s studio beside her home near Loose Park, where the well-known ceramics artist produces charming Santa figurines and Wizard of Oz Christmas ornaments that are a holiday staple at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art store.
Starr’s creativity doesn’t stop at the studio door. For the past 40 years, in collaboration with her partner, Fernando Bozzoli, she has expressed her feel for form and shape through topiary and espalier as well as the potter’s wheel. And her love of color is manifest, not just in glazes, but in huge beds of golden daylilies, brilliant yellow Missouri primroses and spires of purple loosestrife contained within undulating borders of green and white hostas.
A circular rose bed, renovated with shrub varieties after witch’s broom virus decimated the hybrids, claims pride of place up front; varieties of climbers festoon strategically placed arches.
“It takes an artist to have a beautiful garden. I just want to make things pretty,” Starr says.
The grounds are big enough to accommodate many varieties of trees and shrubs, including ginkgo and Chinese dogwood, Bradford pear and crepe myrtle. The same sense of fun that makes Starr’s ceramics so captivating finds expression in her choice of garden accents, including a bottle tree, a topiary bear, and whimsical birdhouses the couple have collected from a maker in Independence.
When it comes to gardening, “I’m about habitat and food,” says well-known Kansas City-based puppeteer Paul Mesner. Edibles claim the lion’s share of space in the Central Hyde Park garden Mesner tends with his partner, David Lucken, “a constant guide star,” Mesner said, “of all the gardening efforts we undertake.”
Mesner designed the backyard scheme of raised boxes planted with beans, tomatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, beets, kale, chard, asparagus, raspberries and strawberries. Filled with soil from Missouri Organic Recycling and presided over by towering pink hollyhocks and yellow sunflowers, the boxes lend an intimate, maze-like feel to this collection of plots. And they come with a bonus: “Rabbits don’t like boxes,” Mesner said. “It’s a huge boon.”
There is a joyous feel to this private world, punctuated by herbs in galvanized buckets and animated by the couple’s brood of roughly a dozen chickens. Out front, ebullient tall lilies line the path to the house; a topiary in the shape of a Tyrannosaurus rex adds a touch of whimsy to a secluded spot. The double yard (Mesner and Lucken own the neighboring property), also includes fruit trees — apple, peach, cherry and pear. Mesner admits he practices a “fair amount of torturing” on the pear trees, submitting them to the pruning and tying practice of espalier. He also enjoys bonsai. The idea of “taking something and manipulating it,” he says, speaks to him as a puppeteer.
If this story puts you in a garden-visiting mood, you can visit six more notable area gardens during the Wornall/Majors House Museums Garden Tour from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, June 4. Tickets cost $25 if purchased by June 3 and $30 on the day of the tour. For tickets (and info about the June 3 Patron’s Party), visit www.wornallmajors.org/GardenTour2016 or call 816.444.1858. Tickets also can be purchased at Hen House grocery stores. Proceeds benefit the Wornall/Majors House Museums.
