W. Gary Smith Design

Art Goes Wild

Garden in the Woods
New England Wild Flower Society
Framingham, Massachusetts

Created with the help of staff and volunteers at the New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods, “Art Goes Wild” is an exhibition of environmental artworks made with native plants and materials harvested from native plants.

Merit Award, Association of Professional Landscape Designers

Visitors entered the exhibition through the Beech Bundle Allée.

Hidden Valley was made with fallen logs and branches relocated from their original positions into a simple serpentine line. It became a permanent sculpture.

Yin and Yang: native ferns and white pine twigs.

Floating Islands stretched across the pond. Tethered to pond’s bottom in a simple line, they moved gently in the breeze.

The islands were made from recycled plastic trays filled with native wetland plants.

Floating Islands in the summer.

Floating Islands is beautiful in all seasons

A mother duck returns every year to build a nest in one of the islands, raising more than fifteen ducklings to date.

In Gathering of Grasses, more than 300 columns of native grasses – each made from a single plant – flowed through the Rare Plant Garden in a naturalistic drift.

Tom Smarr helped to install Gathering of Grass.

The grass bundles for Gathering of Grasses were made in a volunteer workshop.

Dish gardens of native grasses and wildflowers soared across the wildflower meadow in Flying Saucers.