Gardening & artists who garden | NZ Fine Prints

For some people gardening is a chore, for others it is a sandpit for adults. 

The Garden by Barry Ross Smith

The intersection between human habitation and our natural environment is where the intrinsic beauty of plants meets our unique among animals impulse to re-order what nature has created in what appears to us to be a more aesthetically pleasing (and productive) way.  

Detail of Lazy Bones & the Pleasure Garden by Hamish Allan

It is fair bet that those of us who have been bitten by the gardening bug might also want to bring the outdoors inside when it comes to art, decorating our walls with botanical posters for instance. And it is not too far of a stretch to imagine these flora fans are also buying prints of birds in such vast numbers over the past few years as we celebrate the fact that native birds of NZ are being seen in increasing numbers within the gardens of our towns and cities thanks to both pest eradication but also the deliberate creation of habitat in domestic and public gardens.

Japanese artist Hiroshige, the epitome of gardens as art

But as part of a small campaign to exercise our print buyer's more whimsical choices (he jokes that sometimes he can't resist buying what he thinks people should want rather than what they actually do) we have dipped our toes into offering a new collection of wall art - prints of gardens and gardening (we have also allowed him to buy a large range of retro/vintage music and film posters) but he will now be back on the straight and narrow for the next
few months!

Backyard Incinerator by Dick Frizzell 

There are artists who garden,
most famously Claude Monet whose garden at Giverny was, as we would say these days, part of his practice. But local kiwi painters like Jeanette Blackburn are almost as well-known for their garden art galleries as for their work. And then we have Hamish Allan's carefully composed renditions of what could only be a New Zealand backyard, Dick Frizzell's "backyard" series like his prints of lawn mowers and the incinerator pictured here - and then the doyen of NZ garden painters Karl Maughan from whom we still have just the single offset print available, "Riverhead".

The impetus for putting together our new gardens/gardening art collection really came from seeing how the posters of Japanese woodblock prints brought together artistic merit with a celebration of gardening as art, as the gardens in Japan are surely the epitome of the landscape as art. And we thought that maybe people who are into gardening but not so much into art would like to see just how well Japanese style wall art would suit them but they would not think to search for this kind of artwork in our online catalogue.

Gardens are such a fascinating glimpse into the way we imagine we would like to live, from the garden that is neglected to one that is bursting with this season's most fashionable colours how we garden says so much about the people who live in it.  We hope you enjoy our new collection of garden art prints - it is not just for those of us who are into gardens and landscaping, surely there are plenty of folk who may enjoy a garden when it is an artistic expression of aspects of what a garden is framed on the wall rather than being out there pulling out the weeds every weekend!