How does your garden grow?

Spring brings the perfect opportunity for a series of art experiences focusing on the landscape. For my third grade, it's an opportunity to experience the landscape in a creative and personal way.

Garden Views

To prepare for this unit I chose three reproductions with views of gardens: Monet's The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil, with a young girl standing on a garden path dwarfed by walls of golden sunflowers; Renoir's Monet in His Garden, showing the artist painting in his beloved garden, and Charles Burchfield's A Childhood's Garden, an intriguing view of a mysteriously animate cottage surrounded by flowers with sinister faces. The stunning contrast in interpretation, the first two gardens glowing with the radiant warmth of summer's sunlight and colorful blossoms, the third filled with chilly foreboding, seemed the perfect stimulus for a personal view of a garden.

"How does your garden grow?" was the question posed to my class. We talked about gardening, the different ways gardens are planned, and the way plants grow. Once we finished discussing the gardens in the reproductions, we focused on the flowers that make up the garden. I showed prints of two of Georgia O'Keeffe's "bee's eye view" paintings of flowers. The children now had a good idea of how artists portrayed personal views of gardens and flowers.

Creating a Dream Garden

The children were ready to begin planning their own dream garden. I reviewed crayon techniques and prompted them with questions like: Will your garden be safe or dangerous? Will you be looking as close as a bee or looking in from the edge?

Children worked with greater than usual intensity. Some students thought for a while, others began instantly, filled with a private vision. I had decided to use light blue construction paper to eliminate the need for filling a sky, and this seemed to provide new freedom in the use of space. Although we had not discussed the question of the ground line, I was struck immediately by the number of students who abandoned the familiar placement of the ground at the bottom of the picture plane.

The Artists' Gardens

I could not have guessed the range of creative responses that this challenge evoked. I could hear murmurs of surprise and delight as students began to look at each others' creations. Adam showed the roots of plants and ant tunnels in a cutaway view of the earth beneath a garden. Michael dared a bold diagonal close-up of a single blossom and stem. Victoria created a picket fence with flowers arranged in neat rows, while Tiffany filled the entire paper with an intricate pattern of stylized tulips. Lightning flashed over Lynda's garden, and Rebecca included her favorite subject, a horse grazing among the daisies.

Designing a Border

In the second session, since some children were almost finished, I asked if they would like to design a background mat to display their pictures. The response was an enthusiastic "Yes!" so I encouraged them to find an idea or motif in their pictures which could be repeated as a border design. We used white drawing paper to provide a sparkling contrast to the blue paper of the gardens. The children worked just as energetically as they did for their gardens.

A Common Chord

Clearly the idea of a garden resonated deeply in these children. While they were working they were transported into their fantasy garden. What had provoked such creativity, enthusiasm, and joy? Something deep was at work here. We talked of the Garden of Eden and the theme of gardens in art and literature. It seemed that this imaginary venture into gardening had touched a common chord of human experience, a desire to order the mysterious and powerful forces of nature.

It is in such shimmering moments, when I sense that my students have been moved by a transcendent issue of our common humanity, that I feel most successful as a teacher of art. We are, at our best, priests of the sacred boundary where life meets mystery.