Twenty Twenty

I am a long time peasant gardener for the well to do. In this, my final personal garden, a full life time of multi-zonal horticultural influences have blended in a rural and naturalistic landscape.

This mountain top garden owes particular thanks to the West Asheville gardens of Christopher Mello and Damaris and Ricki Pierce. In their gardens I learned that the garden itself could become its own unique entity as a living work of art. I saw an unabashed freedom to release creative energy in the garden, to play, to “live out loud.”

My garden, Ku’ulei ‘Aina was never planned out on paper. I can certainly do that for clients. From the beginning I knew this garden had to be done in full collaboration with the land. I just kept doing the next right thing. Ten years later, with that combination of a new freedom to unleash my creative energy and deep conversation with the land, the adolescent garden that emerged is indeed a living work of art. Seen from a bird’s eye view because of the lay of the land, the garden as a whole is not so different from a painting on the wall. It is an abstract painting swirling with mythology.

I used plants, stones, sculpture and the land itself like paint. The painting emerges fully as a distinct and separate garden of winter. In the growing seasons, three acres of wild cultivated gardens are an ever changing flow of native and cultivated floral abundance.

An amazing feat of horticulture by a skilled maintenance gardener is ongoing. Or I could be suffering delusions of grandeur.

My garden is known. It is not well known. I keep working on that. I do know it is the talk of two counties because of one particular roadside item. There is a red bicycle out there flying through the forest trees.

Christopher Carrie
Fines Creek, NC