Landscape Artist

 

    

My sister is a watercolor artist, a paint medium I find to be very unforgiving. With the right techniques though it's possible to produce beautiful paintings, and she does. Many of her works are influenced by her love of Italy, especially Assisi, and by her love for cats. The one shown here was her impression of a canola field down the road from our home.

 

       

My Dad was a landscape artist. He took photos, picked the ones he liked best, sketched, then painted. His technique evolved over time, using oils sparingly at first and eventually layering paints to enhance the 3 dimensional effect of perspective.

   

 

  But Dad was also a landscape artist in the natural world. He designed and built beautiful houses, ones that blended with their surroundings, and his love for growing both ornamental and vegetable plants together, often in rock gardens, surrounded these homes with additional beauty. 

     

 

Although I never seemed to inherit Dad's skill as an artist, I have always shared his joy of gardening. But flower beds and hanging pots, rock gardens and ornamental bushes will never grace my home yard. Why? Our sheep graze our lawn. Anything I don't want to be grazed upon must be planted behind a fence. There are advantages - less mowing, natural fertilizer, the pleasure of seeing our critters munching away just outside the window - and, even though I suppose it would break the heart of the flower enthusiast to have such a yard, it suits me just fine. I have some flowers interspersed here and there in my two vegetable gardens, splashes of colored attractant for the bees, but they're mainly practical gardens. Planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving keeps me plenty busy, and I think there's beauty in growing food - good, organic, fresh produce...yummmm. I also have a berry garden - raspberries, currants, honey berries (Haskap), apples, and rhubarb which I transform into jams, juices, wines, and desserts.

 

 

 

     My husband and I share the responsibilities of our home yard landscape. We both mow the lawn. I plant, weed, thin, harvest and preserve the garden; he tills, cultivates, adds manure and maintains the fences. We both plant the potatoes and harvest them and the carrots together. He also uses a brush mower to maintain our fields and we both have our own weed whacker.

     Today was a perfect day. Right after my husband finished cultivating we got a beautiful rain. Great timing. You can almost watch the plants grow. The season may be short North of 54, but our long days make up for it.