Garden Variety Artists

"We're lost in all this technology."

by Bruce Schimmel

It's a late-August scorcher, and on a lonely stretch in far Roxborough, the crickets are screaming and my throat is thick with dust. At the end of a fallow field that was once a working farm, artist Simon Draper sighs over a passel of 6-square-foot gardens that encircle a small shed he's building.

"Coming down here today from the Hudson Valley," says Draper in a British accent, "I was somewhat trepidatious."

Some gardens are green and glossy, others crinkle in the heat — reflecting the skill of their respective keepers, whom Draper asked to join him in the garden. Draper returns to screwing painted panels onto the potting shed that doubles as an artist's studio. "It's challenging to farm from a distance of 200 miles."

More British understatement. Most farmers I know live as if their ankles were staked to their land — tied to the earth to which many urbanites are now trying to return.

Having grown up in Wales gardening alongside his dad, Draper knows how hard it is to coax plants out of soil. But as an artist, Draper is now more of a gardener of gardeners, whose ultimate mission is "connectivity."

He builds shed/studios that locate the garden/artist symbolically in the middle of fruition. It's a riff, he says, on the concept of "cultivation," artistic and natural. By helping others get their hands, literally, into the land, he says that they reconnect to each other.

To date, some of Draper's local collaborators — including sixth-graders from the local Waldorf School — have had mixed success.

Not to worry. It's still weeks before Draper's artwork, "Drawn to / Drawn from the Garden," is set to debut — and be consumed. On Sept. 12, Draper and five other artists, commissioned by the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, will present their earthworks in an outdoor exhibition — and barbecue — called "Down to Earth: Artists Create Edible Landscapes."

Curator Amy Lipton's goal is "socially engaging interventions in the landscape." And she's assembled an artistic smorgasbord.

In "Urban Defense," artist Susan Leibovitz Steinman reworks the über-defensiveness of the Pentagon with a five-sided urban forest orchard that's grounded in the principles of permaculture, where companion plants defend each other. Artists Steffi Domike and Ann Rosenthal's "An American Roots Garden" is an homage to early and Native American foods, with a garden of traditional staples like corn, squash and beans planted in a patchwork to resemble a quilt. In a very different twist on "Edible Landscape," artist Stacy Levy's "Kept Out" documents the raging appetite of deer, which suburbs have turned into pests. Knox Cummin's "Not Drain Away" highlights overloaded sewers with a sculpture that's also a functional rainwater collector. And the healing power of herbs is celebrated by Joan Bankemper in "Willa," in a tribute to that Paleolithic fertility statue, the Venus of Willendorf.

All of these artists' works are meant to engage us with the earth. But in some respect, Draper's group garden is the toughest, because its success depends on people working together.

"We're lost in all this technology" that supposedly connects us, says Draper, who believes that the best way to reconnect is "get our hands dirty ... and stuck back into the soil."

More on the "Down to Earth" opening and barbecue at schuylkillcenter.org.