The Art of, and Art in, the Garden

Part of the charm and very nature of Ojai’s unique Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve begins with the complex task of getting there, before the “being there” sinks in. It’s a complicated trek, involving an unmarked street off of Highway 150, a route with twists and a coded gate, before the road crosses a running creek which, when serious rain comes (as happened recently), passage is highly unwise.

Once you make your way into this remote locale in the Santa Ana Canyon, north of Ojai proper, it’s hard to deny that this is one of the more enchanted and inspiring pieces of real estate in the entire 805. Of course, “real estate” is a misleading term, for this curated acreage is taking the nature preserve seriously. Founded in 1981 along with the Conservation Endowment Fund by horticulture aficionado John Taft, the property has been available for tours, rentals, weddings, and peace of mind pilgrimages for visitors. The 264-acre gardens have taken on a fresh new twist only since 2020, with the addition of an integral art and artist residency program on the site.

For that, we can partly thank COVID.

Retracing the genesis of the residency program, after the pandemic hit, artist Cassandra C. Jones recalled “I was home, doom scrolling, my kids were home, my husband [Mikael Jorgensen, keyboardist with Wilco] was home. I had the idea [for the residency]. I’m like a fire hose of ideas, and I don’t always follow them all, but because I had nothing else to do, I went with it in the moment. I had the idea and literally sat down and wrote a proposal to start an artist residency.”

She approached Jaide Whitman, the then incoming CEO of Taft and John Taft’s granddaughter, and offered to teach her how to have and host a residency, which Jones knew something about, as an artist. Jones remembers that, “she responded ‘that’s a great idea.’”

As plans started to formalize, Jones said, “We had a big fundraiser, and it was like this glorious proof of concept. And the fundraiser just happened to be on the weekend that Biden was like, the pandemic’s over. So everyone came out and nobody had been out in so long.”

She did a crash course, thanks to horticulturalists linked to the garden, in the plant world, and finding ways that artists could be immersed and influenced by the place. Working and talking with artists, Jones points to, “this kind of openness, and we would all sit on the floor in this round studio and talk about nature and how hard it is to make good choices, environmental choices in modern times.”

In her own artistic practice, one of Jones’s projects dealt with the tragic prevalence of plastic particles in the environment around us. Her workload now includes curating such efforts as the unique Mega Gallery, a mini-space in downtown Ojai which is “open 24/7,” with art viewable through the window and accessible via a QR code. It’s a 21^st century gallery in a box and a cyber-portal.

Last Saturday, Jones gave one of her engaging monthly tours of the garden, leading an eager group through the African and Australian gardens on the property and leading up to the art studios with residents on hand to discuss their site-specific creative endeavors.

Taft’s concept of a garden was less neatly organized and horticulturally inclined in an official way, like the Huntington Library garden or Montecito’s Lotusland, but rather a showcase of plants he collected from different worldly points in his travels. Unlike the Huntington, Jones commented, Taft is “not like a symphony, but more like free jazz.”

At this moment, after the rains, the property was particularly resplendent in the orange-blossoming aloe plants — an image embedded in Taft’s floral logo. “I’ve never seen so many here,” Jones said of the wild bursts of orange in the garden.” On a less celebratory note, She added, “because of climate change, we never know what’s going to happen in the garden.”

Along the tour, Jones stopped at the Portia plant and pointed out the appearance of Fibonacci spirals, as commonly associated with the sunflower and actually appearing in many plants and flowers. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” she said, pointing out that her garden-related revelation appealed to the innate pattern orientation long part of her aesthetic.

In the African garden, we checked out the Elephant Food tree (Portulacaria afra). “Elephants do eat it. It thrives on neglect,” she noted. We stopped at the bulbous-trunked Bottle Tree and were invited to make the classic, literal gesture and genuflection of “hugging a tree.” I obliged, and felt better for it.

In the upper region of the Taft property, art and events prevail. The friendly expanse of green, the “wedding lawn,” nestles up against a large raptor cage, both of which are used in the annual art exhibition and fundraiser here (the next exhibition, always a sell-out, is on June 6). A nearby structure is a rental dwelling, currently the happy temporary home for lucky occupants.

Also in this area, Jones the artist, who works with manipulating and channeling nature-leaning digital imagery, has left her stamp — on the bathroom walls. Less graffiti than an artful, elevated wallpaper, her art about plant life asserts a clean minimalist allure, in rippling repetitions.

Six years into the residency program, many artists have passed through in tenures of varying lengths, including such Santa Barbarans as Madeleine Ignon and Stephanie Dotson, who embarked on a joint residency. Another local artist who thrived in the residency was Eliot Spalding, whose project, Jones said, “was to take Japanese mulberry paper, wet it with creek water, and put it on a shape on the tree. She would let it dry for 24 hours and then peel it off, and she’d have a perfect mold of whatever feature on the tree was.”

As the culmination of the tour, we stopped in to see the work of the art, and the two of the nine artists currently in residency at the Garden. Tom Pazderka, an Ojai-based artist who has shown his distinctive ash paintings in Santa Barbara, and runs the County Arts Administration galleries “by day,” has responded to the garden surroundings on both aesthetic and literally interactive terms.

He pays homage to plant life by burning specific specimens and using the ash as a kind of surrogate graphite medium on black surfaces to create “It’s painting,” he told us, “but also a kind of reverse drawing.” Thematically, Pazderka extends his ongoing artistic concept of dealing with “the process of living and dying, all in one.”

A father and son team in the residency, Rodrigo and Hugo Ormachea, have long run a custom jewelry store in Ojai and were working on jewelry and ceramic pieces inspired by the garden environment. Rodrigo has been creating ceramic pieces, sometimes embedded with the jewelry-centric stuff of gold and silver, after finding forms in the garden, “taking that as a tool to create new forms.” Hugo, who emigrated to Ventura County from Cusco, Peru, in 1981, described the translation of nature to art: “It’s a process. Unconsciously. The forms come.”

On the leisurely walk back down to the garden’s homebase, with a gift shop and a centering liftoff area, Jones stopped to admire the specimens in the path-hugging cacti garden. She returned to a recurring theme of the tour, pointing out the Fibonacci spiral elements in the cacti patterns.

Once seen, it’s hard to unsee. Ditto, this magical place.

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