Week 18: Littlehampton

Welcome to Helen Alice Johnson Artist in the Garden.

This week I am in a very special garden. This is the garden of Ron and Angie. Ron is my father in law and Angie is his beautiful wife and they have been tending to this garden for the last 20 years. We have been visiting it for many of those. Every time I come here this garden is different, but it always seems to be sunny. The sun is always shining here, or so it seems! So I am going to take you for a walk around with a very special addition of Ron, who is going to talk you through his garden.

Ron: ‘I like gardening because you see things grow and I love vegetable gardening because you can eat the produce! Over my life I’ve done much more vegetable gardening than flowers and shrubs. But in this garden, we don’t grow much (edible produce). We use it for pleasure, and the shrubs are the main thing, and the flowers. And this area here is going to be bedded. I started by putting a few geranium plants in.’

Helen: ‘Yes, and these are Grandad’s Geraniums aren’t they? Tell us about them.’

Ron: Yes, these are ones that my father had, and he gave me some, and I’ve kept them. They are unusual because the leaves have got that white edging and the flowers are pale pink and they are lovely. Goodness knows how long he’d had them but I’ve been growing them for about 30 to 40 years!’

Ron: ‘You can see I’m starting to bed out this bed this year. The shrubs were here, that Choisya (when they moved in 20+ years ago) has just come out. It’s a little bit early - it’s renowned for coming out at the end of May, but the white flowers are out early because of our climate change. Next to it is another shrub that doesn’t flower’

So it occurred to me when I walked around this garden with Ron and listened to him talk about his plans for this season that actually gardening and painting and gardeners and painters - artists, are kind of one and the same really. For Ron, and Angie, the garden is like their canvas - the soil is like their canvas, and the flowers and the plants that they put into the garden are like their paints.

So I am hugely looking forward to coming back later in the summer, to see their masterpiece and how it has developed. In the meantime, I’m going to go away and try my very hardest to do this garden justice and to do Ron and Angie’s hard work justice by recreating it in some way in paint.

So, I hope you enjoyed that very special walk around. A little bit different this week. It’s highly unlikely that this will be an abstract painting that I’ll do. It’s much more likely to be a painting that has Ron in it. That has his finger prints if you like. I think it was the Pre Raphaelites or somebody from the Pre Raphaelites who said that when they painted you could see the thumb print of the hand of God in nature and what I aim to do with this painting is show that it’s got Ron and Angie all over it.

So thanks ever so much for watching. A little bit indulgent but I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing you in a garden somewhere next Sunday and don’t forget to keep watching Saturday in the Studio to see how this painting progresses. Thanks again.