Suzan Osborn holds a copy of “An Eden of Sorts” next to her original paintings.(Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Walking into Suzan Osborn’s Park Lane home is like entering a wing of an art museum. Her garden paintings hang on every wall and sit on ornate easels. The colors seem at first to be pastel but are more vivid and saturated. Suzan describes the colors as “those of an English country garden reflected through a prism held up to the south of France.”
The consistent theme and palette make a soothing, happy wave throughout the downstairs rooms. It’s hard to imagine ever feeling grumpy or dispirited in this ever-beautiful garden.
Every painting has a story, and many relate to Harvard gardens—a row of pink poppies, each one nodding in a different direction; a garden of sturdy daylilies, curving in a profusion of color out the back of the canvas.
A first foray into illustration
On a white closet door in the family room, eight paintings, two across, four down, are the originals for illustrations that Suzan recently did for a book called “An Eden of Sorts” by acclaimed author John Hanson Mitchell. It was Suzan’s first foray into illustration and publication, and it is fun to see how clearly amazed and pleased she is to be in the Library of Congress!
It is these stories—her lifetime of garden painting, her Harvard commissions, and her recent work with Mitchell—that Suzan will share at the joint meeting of the Harvard Woman’s Club and the Garden Club of Harvard on Monday, February 24.
A garden painter ‘all my life’
“I’ve been a garden painter all my life,” says Suzan, and she has a painting done when she was eight years old to prove it. But it wasn’t until she and her family moved to Harvard in 1982 that her passion became a profession. She put an ad in the Harvard Post and began taking commissions.
Her decision to “go public” was propelled by a couple of specific events. A colleague at Skinner’s asked Suzan to do a painting of the camellias at the Lyman Estate greenhouses to present to a retiring friend. The painting met with rave reviews. Of perhaps even greater import was Suzan’s private realization of her potential. She was doing a painting of her own garden, and in a certain moment she decided that was “what she would do.” Working with color, form, shape, making abstract forms realistic, taking the “physical artwork” of a garden and capturing it at her easel—this would be her work.
Long acquaintance leads to collaboration
Suzan has known Mitchell since their sons were in preschool together. She recalls his wife telling her, “My husband wants to be a published writer.” Twenty-odd years later, Mitchell has certainly achieved that dream. He has, in fact, published 11 books, his best known being “Ceremonial Time.” In that work Mitchell creates a strong sense of place by describing the natural history of his square-mile property in Littleton.
His latest book, “An Eden of Sorts,” continues the story of that same property, this time telling “The Natural History of My Feral Garden.” Mitchell writes about how he cleared almost two acres of white pines, not to save the land from chaos, but rather from stagnation, to allow a greater biodiversity.
He created a variety of gardens—vegetable, annual, shrub, meadow, perennial, and pond. And he built structures: a Thoreauvian cottage, an arbor, a potting shed, a summer house. As he saw the rural character of his surroundings slip further and further away, he planted more. His garden became “a sanctuary,” “a bulwark against modernity,” “a stage for all the natural players of the world.”
Into this profusion of garden spaces and ideas, Mitchell invited Suzan. He had asked her before to illustrate his work, and this time she was ready. “I felt it would be an opportunity and a gift to me to have my pictures presented in this way.”
Reality touched by fantasy
Suzan describes the process by which she and Mitchell worked together. They walked through the gardens in the early spring, and after that Suzan worked from photos and sketches she made in the garden. Mitchell gave her a draft of the book, and they agreed that there would be an illustration at the beginning of each chapter that would try to capture the essence of that section.
He stipulated that there be no domestic animals pictured. With the exception of his ever-digging Jack Russell terrier, Mitchell talks only of wildlife, of which he is an acute observer. He has recorded years of data on the migratory dates of darners and monarchs, and he can distinguish the different species of fireflies by how high they fly and by their flash patterns.
Suzan describes her paintings as “reality with a bit of fantasy.” She admits to “moving” a clump of flowers from their actual spot into the picture, or “transporting” the arbor so that it frames the garden shed. Perhaps there weren’t really three green darners in the same garden at the same time, but it is certainly true that green darners are abundant in the gardens. The turkeys didn’t mind appearing in a different spot, and the frog could have been on that rock, even if he wasn’t at that moment. Mitchell confesses to having “messy garden practices,” and Suzan says her illustrations do some “tidying up.”
Just as Suzan’s paintings create a “wave” through her home, the “Eden” illustrations create a motif through the book. Suzan achieves consistency by her signature style and by the recurring palette used for the flowers and trees. Many of the paintings include whimsical structures, all done in pale yellow and white. Others feature a statue or an urn overflowing with colorful annuals. Each is an intimate space, and yet the perspective provides depth, suggesting trees and paths that lie beyond.
The lines and colors of plants are echoed in other elements of the composition. She has placed a small, live figure in each drawing to give further continuity. As a result, Suzan’s illustrations provide an order and focus to the profusion of Mitchell’s text. In their depiction of the colorful life of the garden and love of the natural world, they capture the quiet and stillness of this natural sanctuary.
Environmental activist with diverse interest
Mitchell begins each chapter at a fixed point in time and with a fairly clear topic, but soon he digresses. An environmental activist, he rails against encroaching developments of “unnecessary” mansions, of a car dealership built “over a cornfield.” He argues against the traditional lawn with its dependence on pesticides, urging instead the merits of a meadow, with ever changing colors, full of insects. As a natural historian he imagines his plot of land back over time, with “mastodons standing around in gardens where the tea roses now bloom” or “giant sloths in the vegetable patches.”
A tide of human and natural interaction
He is interested in the social and cultural history of the land, the people who lived there and the old tools, medicine bottles, and shards of willowware rescued from the junk heap. Being an observer of animals—red fox, voles, mice, rabbits—he keeps a wildlife “count” of the cycles of dominance. Of tracking animals, he says, “The snow had created a blank slate whereon was written the stories of the night.” He shares delightful stories of visits from The English Lady and of the children who have grown up on tales of fairies cavorting in the garden at night. And always, he is a philosopher: “All this human and natural interaction is part of a larger tide that sweeps the seas of time.”
I enjoyed Mitchell’s eclectic observations, admired his vast knowledge, identified with his outrage, and found inspiration in his poetic descriptions. But I was always glad to come to the start of a new chapter, to leave the text and spend time with Suzan’s lovely painting, to let it ground me in the still beauty of that place, in that moment.
