Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Westerners used to go to Morocco in search of sex, drugs and Paul Bowles. Keeyla Meadows, though, was drawn by a color: the distinctive blue that artist Jacques Majorelle used for objects in his Marrakesh garden.
"I saw Majorelle blue in a magazine and totally fell in love," she writes in her new book, "Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel" (Timber Press; $27.95). Three years later, she flew to Marrakesh: "I had never planned to visit Morocco, but that blue really struck a cord. That blue has inspired many a garden creation for me and others."
It became the "seed color"- the color around which others are organized - for a sanctuary garden that received an award from Sunset magazine.
In Meadows' own Berkeley garden, Majorelle blue is just one fragment on a whirl of color. A sculptor and painter as well as garden designer, she's filled the space with multihued statues and mosaics, complemented with flowers and foliage that talk back to the artworks.
There's a serpent in this paradise, tightly coiled in the pavement. "I've been working with a lot of snake motifs," Meadows says. "Snakes are fitting for a garden. I love the way they move, flowing with the ground."
Her fascination goes back to her childhood in a Southern California canyon, surrounded by reptilian neighbors: "I once showed my mom - my very powerful, fearless mother - a harmless garter snake and she screamed and fainted dead away."
Trained as Sculptor
Academically trained as a sculptor, Meadows said she got her start in gardening in the 1970s from the late Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich, who ran Western Hills Nursery in Sonoma County.
"I got an education on plants from Marshall and learned how to do landscape from Lester. Lester was an artist, and I basically learned how to plant out plants from him. He helped me get a trust in my intuition, follow a visual rhythm."
Whatever her design motif, her work is drenched in color. She pairs royal blue with chartreuse in one corner of her garden, and surrounds cool blues and turquoises with hot red flowers and paint.
"The whole relationship to color is to take permission from the flowers," she said. "That's part of the foundation of this color book. Allow yourself to have the same kind of attraction to flowers that birds and bees do. Use that as your authority and permission."
Meadows' book, lavishly illustrated with her own photographs, offers basic guidelines for designing with color: pick a principal color, then work with harmonious and contrasting shades. She explains how it works: "I pick a hardscape piece with a certain color palette and harmonize plants with those colors, matching it up to flowers and leaves that give me a flow."
She pointed out the purples in a ceramic planter and the burgundy leaves of ornamental sweet potato and heuchera: "You're pulling colors through an area by making a color stream."
In a playful tone, she offers readers exercises for becoming more comfortable with color: keep a color journal, experiment with paint chips, visit a museum. Instead of the traditional color wheel, she likes to work with a "color triangle" with a primary color (red, blue, yellow) at each apex.
"The strong point of my book is it shows how to apply your color palette - the seed color and harmonious and contrasting shades - to space," she said. That means setting up the garden as a series of pictures, each with a strong focal point and a visual frame - a painterly way of looking at things. (Meadows cites Monet as a primary inspiration, but says she's also influenced by Matisse, Miro, Mondrian and Gaudi.)
No Room Outdoors
She's not happy with the fashionable notion of the garden as a series of semi-enclosed rooms: "As a child I wanted to be out of the room and outside. There are a lot of ways a garden can function as rooms, but I prefer to see it as a connection to nature. We have a reciprocal relationship with plants. You give to a plant and it gives back to you."
Embracing color can have benefits beyond the garden, as Lynn Simon of Montclair discovered. When Meadows designed and installed the garden at Simon's home, Simon became involved in the process. "The experience altered my approach to colors in other spheres of my life, encouraging me to introduce color elements to my home, and even the way I dress."
Meadows is aware of the tension between design principles and intuition: "When I started the book, I was just, 'Trust your intuition.' Well, that's a stopper. I had to look for some principles to follow. Once readers start to feel their own connections and their own path, they can discard that. When you follow your intuition, surprise is part of the equation. You're going to do something you weren't planning, and you're open for surprises to come in. Mistakes are steppingstones onto a new path."
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Fearless Color Gardens: The Creative Gardener's Guide to Jumping Off the Color Wheel by Keeyla Meadows
(Timber Press; 2009; $27.95).
Keeyla Meadows Gardens + Art: keeylameadows.net.
Check for spring and summer open-garden dates.
Keeyla Meadows Gardens + Art: keeylameadows.net.
Check for spring and summer open-garden dates.
Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance garden writers in Berkeley. Check out their Web site at www.selbornesurveys.com or e-mail them athome@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/20/DD941ALIP1.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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