Sherry Tseng Hill's There Is Another Garden

There is Another Garden combines two of my life-long loves: art and gardening; art came first and, seemingly, naturally.

​Trained as an architect, I saw garden design as an essential part of fashioning a holistic environment - the inside and the outside, the built and the natural, the planned and the organically evolved. It wasn’t until I reached my adult years that I found myself really wanting to garden. The art side of it inspires me; the science side of it challenges me. In the beginning I found it is easy, but only if I could get the plants to do exactly what I want them to do! Deciding that Dollar Pennyroyals are a good-looking ground cover was a comforting acceptance. Ah, but the challenge was part of the fun. After I decided that it was all going to be just one big experiment anyway, everything was good.

Seeing butterfly caterpillars decimating milkweeds, discovering chrysalises in the most unlikely places, releasing ladybugs, sighting a green anole puffing up his red throat, finding a broken blue egg shell of a robin on the ground, studying the curlicues of mushrooms sprouting from a cut tree stump, and observing the very fine veins of a staghorn fern shield (Staghorn Fern Series), are just a few of myriad delights and yes, also pain, that my garden offers me. 

In one corner of my yard, under a second-floor deck,there is a rain garden. Enclosed by a wall on one side and fences on two sides, bordered by a compost area with a cairn (where a beloved cat is buried) to one side of it, a pile of twigs provides refuge to small critters. An Eastern Redbud next to this garden has had conks (polypores) growing on the trunk so I know it is in distress and it is slowly showing its decline. Hanging Ball Mosses from the structure of the deck above drape down and gives an air of a mysterious garden. It inspired me to create Rain Garden Rhapsody series.

I find solace in the stately tree trunks. Musing on them gave me the idea to create the Tree Bark series, using pages from books as a tie between the idea of trees and the passage of time, the making of books with the exchange of ideas, and so on.

My garden is a living canvas for me and a place where I can go to refill my creative well.