Artist turns flower palette into garden art.

By Nancy Schoeffler

GLASTONBURY, Conn.AuYou canAAEt help but notice all those flowers. Drive along Main Street in Glastonbury and youAAEll spot a little tan cottage with a sloped roof and red trim. It sits on the edge of wetlands, ringed with stone walls and walkways and terraces that burst with thousands of flowers, an almost madcap explosion of colors and shapes. This is the home of Harry White, an exuberant artist who explains, AoIAAEve grown my own palette.Ao White uses real flowers in his art, an intricate form of collage he calls AofleurageAo. ItAAEs a far cry from dainty pressed flowers. His collages swirl with energetic colors and forceful imagery, such as the spectacular piece above his piano titled, AoFull Moon: The EmperorAAEs RobeAo. What makes WhiteAAEs artwork so intriguing is that it isnAAEt static. Like the sculptures of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, WhiteAAEs collages change over time. AoIAAEm going to shock you,Ao he says, showing a photograph of AoFull MoonAo when he first completed it. The colors have changed dramatically. A brilliant fiesta red has mellowed into a tawny beige. AoItAAEs not that the original color is better,Ao says White, 60. AoItAAEs different. ItAAEs evolved. WeAAEre in a culture that simply canAAEt handle that we age. IAAEm telling them: Age well.Ao White says he knows which colors will hold their own over timeAusuch as the blues of his beloved delphiniums, the very permanent orange of a clementine peel and the AobestAo white, which is the skin around a bulb of garlicAuand which colors are likely to fade. Sometimes he intentionally chooses petals because they will fade. AoAfter 35 years, I know whatAAEs going to happen,Ao he says. White, who grew up in Niantic and majored in interior design, specializing in fabric design, works as a personal florist and garden consultant. He also worked for a while creating window displays for a Boston jewelry store. ThatAAEs evident in the design of the shelves in the kitchen of his cottage, which he has lighted and backed in fabric. AoThe first thing you decorate with in a house is the light. Then the rugs. Then whatever you can fish out of the trash,Ao he says. White isnAAEt kidding. A workbench that he found rotting in a field is now a handsome buffet in his dining room. WhiteAAEs sense of humor also comes through in his collages. The background in one of his pieces is spinach: AoIsnAAEt that a riot?Ao Another series of works is based on manhole covers he saw in a sidewalk. In another, he artfully weaves in an elastic remnant of an underwear waistband. And in an early piece, he used the tobacco from a cigarette butt he found in the gutter, a detail that he says entranced Eleanor Saidenberg, an early US collector of PicassoAAEs work, who encouraged him. White says she told him he was Aothe American version of Kurt SchwittersAo, a German artist known for incorporating castoffs and found objects in his montages. AoThe thing about Americans is you do things with such a sense of humor,Ao White says she said. Saidenberg also advised him never to let anyone tell him what to do in his artwork. AoThatAAEs one of the benefits of being an artist,Ao he says. AoYou get to go into the zone. ItAAEs like a puzzle you put together.Ao He has used everything from wood shavings, paint peelings, bits of a waspAAEs nest, barbed wire and bark to sushi seaweed, seed heads and rose hips (AoThey look like theyAAEre dancing!Ao), along with the occasional bit of litter, like the foil of a HersheyAAEs Kiss or a broken matchstick. Some of WhiteAAEs pieces are almost quiltlike; others look like stained glass. He has experimented, such as a piece in which he stepped on the fragile flower petals with his sneakers to leave a subtle tread pattern. He sometimes takes a razor blade and stipples the petals when they are glued down on the board but still wet. In his garden designs, too, White has seized upon the ephemeral. In one clientAAEs garden, he hung what he calls Aoa necklace of stonesAo attached to ivy, like a sculpture. WhiteAAEs garden is featured in AoThe Inspired Garden: Twenty-Four Artists Share Their VisionAo, published in March. Author Judy Paolini writes: AoAs a lifelong gardener, he knows that one thing he can depend on is change. No garden remains exactly the same from one year to the next, and every move made leads to another possibility. He revels in this constant motion.Ao The garden around WhiteAAEs cottageAuwhich was built as an artistAAEs studio in 1853AuAois the joy of my life,Ao White says. AoI am at one with flowers.Ao A slope down to the wetlands was all brush. He built a retaining wall and transformed it into his own personal Eden with daffodils, hollyhocks, tree peonies, irises, lobelia, marsh marigolds, mountain laurel, Jack-in-the-pulpit and primroses. And, of course, delphiniums: AoIAAEve slaved over them, but thatAAEs my blue.Ao White has built so many stone walls that his nephew told him, AoUncle Harry, you moved a mountain.Ao AoI just did a little piece at a time,Ao White says. AoIAAEm out here playing all the time.Ao LATWP News Servic

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