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THE GARDEN AT SPRING ROAD

 

JESSIE SHEELER

 

Janet Boulton’s kitchen door has six glass panels each bearing a sandblasted letter. They announce what lies beyond —JARDIN — introducing the presence in this garden of other cultures and ways of perceiving. Pervaded by a feeling of homage, it is an artist's garden with three distinct, often overlapping themes — art, gardening and the human spirit.

 

Gardens, their equipment, favourite parts of them and their past glories receive affectionate accolades, reverent and sometimes humorous. Two works allude to Boulton’s wishful thinking about lawns unattainable in her garden. A tiny square of soil with a single plant set into the paved garden path has a label installed — Chamomile Lawn, while attached to a door in the garden wall, shaded by and facing foliage, a glass pane bearing the word LAWN depends on its green reflections to comfort the longing for a greensward. An old apple picker’s ladder has an In Memoriam tablet at its feet, memorial to all the apple orchards of England that have been allowed to die. In the midst of thickly planted ferns and aquilegias, set low near a large Victorian chimney pot a length of cherrywood is inscribed HEARTH, a word to be read not only as a whole but also letter by letter, as the tones and elements of a painting may be looked at, to reveal the layers of meaning within — the centre of a home, hear, close to our heart; earth, heath, art.

 

The influence of Ian Hamilton Finlay in the garden is evident, indeed celebrated, most overtly by the installation on a garden seat of ML11 8NG in blue acrylic on perspex — the postcode of Little Sparta. In a work which matches Finlay’s elegant wit Boulton has placed amid a camouflage of shrub and ivy a brick plinth on which are two metal watering cans pointing their long and unmistakably aggressive spouts at the advancing visitor. Clearly they are either guns or war trumpets, though the inscription on the plaque beneath them slyly reading THIS IS NOT AN ATTACK is a response to one of Finlay’s Detached Sentences on Gardening — Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.

 

In this narrow garden, a modern hortus conclusus, Boulton deploys images and concepts which recur in her paintings and paper reliefs.Thus still life composition gives the garden its structure, some works suggesting a further development of the genre, others preoccupied with the various qualities of light and opacity. Two glass panels are set with a space between them, both with the same lettering — NATURE MORTE. Sunlight on them casts shadows and reflections of the words and the garden around them; this is the “still life”, gracefully acknowledging the analytical Cubist all-round simultaneity of perception.

 

The evanescent qualities of reflection lie at the heart of another complex work. Two more sandblasted glass panels set on plinths to mirror each other have poésie on one, psyché on the other. The illusory bevelling of the panels gives the effect of framed pictures, predominantly of their words but with the garden elements too. Poésie, described by Braque as “harmony of rapports, of rhythm... of metamorphosis...” might be called the soul of art. The Greek word psyche means the soul or animating principle of life, personified in myth by beautiful Psyche, the beloved of Cupid. In the words of Pierre Reverdy, poet and friend of Braque and Picasso “Poésie is to literature as Cubism is to painting.” This work celebrates the Cubist use of words in painting while it encapsulates the essence of Art. In a final, subtle celebration of reflectiveness Boulton gives her psyché an acute accent, psyché in French having the additional meaning of cheval glass. A cleverly condensed tribute to Reverdy’s achievements is the nearby signpost pointing in two directions, NORD -SUD, the title of Reverdy’s influential if short lived periodical.

A work dedicated to Juan Gris has a plaque showing his dates attached to a wooden table, narrow and suggestive of an altar. Its slate top scored in squares evokes Boulton's paintings of chequered surfaces as well as Gris’ analytical Cubist painting. Pots of plants with white labels are set on the table, a tribute to Gris’ striking use of white. The plants vary with the season —dark leaved begonias, white bellis daisies or box plants, all reflecting his limited palette.

 

The English artist Paul Nash is honoured in a work referring to his fondness for the English countryside. Hidden in the crook of a hawthorn tree and cradling three speckled plastic eggs is bird's nest woven from electric wire, not easily seen against the tree, but implying illumination. On the branch above a plaque of (appropriately) Purbeck stone bears an early version of Nash’s monogram.

 

Another composition concerned with light at the end of the garden is a tree clad in ivy with the letters GNOS installed, startlingly, in white neon. Despite an initial opacity in the meaning of the letters, two ways of interpretation emerge. In reverse order the letters read SONG. They are also a contraction of the word GNOSIS — knowledge, specifically that of spiritual enlightenment, and those two concepts, lyricism and inner light are beautifully symbolised in the purity of the neon light on the dark tree.

 

In antithesis there is a work on the garden's brick wall, in condensed black lettering designed by Boulton —UMBRAUMBRAE — the shadow of shadow, the shade of shade, or the very essence of its nature which depends on its opposite. Boulton’s work is characterised by a sense of tone and light, mistiness, changeability, contrast and the blurring of boundaries, qualities expressive either actually or metaphorically central to our human experience. This meditative and contemplative quality pervades Boulton’s garden and adds to it a distiction that enhances its constituent parts — the skilled plantings, the humour and the innovative design.