Our Gardens from an Artistic Perspective

As a landscape painter and a person who is never without a pencil and drawing book nearby, my relationship with our gardens is twofold. First, there is the visual beauty of the gardens, ranging from vast varieties of flowers and their vibrant range of colors and heights. With every detail of the gardens, I first visualize my surroundings in terms of sketches, designs, color combinations and paintings.

For me, many of the garden themes are translated into paintings by Monet, Corot, Rousseau, Van Gogh and a host of other painters from times past. Our gardens here at Blackberry Farm have been the source for a number of my landscape paintings, drawings and still life paintings. On some occasions when I bring produce home, I will arrange it on the kitchen table and either draw the arrangement or do a still life painting of the subject matter.

I recall one occasion when I brought some freshly dug potatoes home, and my wife was getting ready to prepare some of them for supper when I said, “Don’t touch the potatoes! They haven’t been recorded yet. (No potato left behind)."

In late September last year, I was walking though a field of white shoepeg milling corn when a creative moment of inspiration came to me. The corn blades on the stalks were dry, as were the shucks on the ears of corn. The sky was clear and of a deep cobalt blue. I pulled the shucks back on several ears of corn, exposing the white kernels. These exposed ears of white shoepeg corn were a beautiful display against the background of the deep blue sky. Corn that would later become cornmeal, grits, hominy and corn flour, was for an instant a great source of inspiration for an artistic rendition.

–  John Coykendall, Blackberry Farm Master Gardener