Garden gallery showcases pieces of art

You can't say a rusty old auto part, a long-neglected farm implement or a random pile of scrap metal have no garden-art potential. Because in the hands of the right person, they could have a heap. Same for a reject dress-shop fixture. A tutu even.

This will all make sense later. For now, let's start at the beginning, and that would be the garden part of the garden-art story. The gallery, you might say.

Although one could certainly make an argument to the contrary, preparation of the gallery space comes first.

That was the approach, anyway, taken by gardener and metal artist Marieke Heatwole.

Heatwole considers herself a gardener first and an artist second. She comes from a long line of horticulturists, including a grandfather who has a bonsai at the Smithsonian. So when she left her garden in Ketchikan, Alaska, and moved to Anchorage in 1999, it wasn't so much that she and her husband bought a new house that came with a garden, as the other way around. The perennials were incredible.

But she was used to gardening in the Southeast.

"To this day I laugh when people say they have slug problems here," she said. "They are HUGE down there. As big as my cat."

Revolting garden pests she could handle. She just wasn't sure how to overwinter her new perennials. And the orderliness of them threw her.

The beds had been created by a gardener from Midwest farm country. Although a lot of gardeners would appreciate the symmetry, she's not one of them.

"There were marching rows of delphiniums and yarrow," she said. "They were very obedient."

So she did what any self-respecting disobedient gardener would do. She panicked. She sought help from a monotony exorcist, landscape designer Sally Arant.

"Sally just shook her head and took my garden hose and laid it out on the grounds in a snakelike pattern and said, 'This is your new garden bed.'

"One of her key landscape-design covenants is the thought of creating rooms in your garden," Heatwole said. "And what better way to accentuate that than with some three-dimensional art."

Once rearranged, Heatwole moved into her garden rooms in a big way.

"I mean, I'm so sentimental about my garden and everything in it," she said. "Definitely everything has a story."

Among favorites in her garden gallery rooms is the first sculpture she ever made, in Hugh McPeck's sculpture class at the University of Alaska Anchorage, a study of a Louise Nevelson assemblage, stylized in metal and wood. It's 4-feet tall, 2-feet wide and planted at the front of her house with a Polestar Rose climbing all over it.

The reject dress-shop fixture is another. It's a two-dimensional outline of a woman in quarter-inch steel rod made as a mannequin for the Out of the Closet consignment shop, only the shoulders came out too wide. Heatwole saw it on the wall of her favorite machine shop, fell for it and planted it in her sunny patio garden area.

Which brings us to the tutu.

She's working on a wearable art piece made of metal mesh, and as a study she ordered a tutu, the kind a prima ballerina wears that stick straight out like a pancake. So the broad-shouldered mannequin is wearing the tutu, and the tutu is wearing a clematis.

Garden art can be functional or not, used as an accent or a focal point, Heatwole said. As a focal point, it can lure people deeper into the garden, or tempt them to turn a corner.

She's also all about height, she says. She has two garden art pieces under construction now, both studies of each other, "Spire Study #1" and "Spire Study #2." Both are columnar basaltlike formations, one of hypertufa (a mix of concrete and peat moss), the other of scrap steel, inspired by a friend's new garden that needs some height.

Placement is everything, she said.

"Don't plunk, place your art. Don't just stab it into the ground. It should be seated or nestled or perched in the earth."

Her first rule? There are no rules, she said.

OK, one rule. Too much is too much.

"I would be broke if I bought everything I love. I would have no garden. So I'm selective both for pocketbook and aesthetic. And people shouldn't think garden art has to be expensive or bourgeois.

"I probably have 15 things in my garden, but they are placed, they are part of the garden. Some you only see in the winter. Some only in spring."

"No rule is my first rule. I guess my second rule would be to love it."