Come walk in my country garden

Six country gardens are on the Albert Lea Art Center’s Art & Garden Tour 2009.

The tour will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.

Tickets are $8 per person. They are available at Addie’s Floral & Gifts, Ben’s Floral & Frame Designs, Doyle’s Hallmark and the Albert Lea Art Center. The tickets include addresses and maps to the gardens.

These are the gardens on the tour, along with the artists who will be featured in each garden.

Paul and Jan Overgaard

In the Overgaard yard, a rain garden was designed by Steve Tubbs to be a filter between the lawn and lake to minimize the amount of fertilizer nutrients entering and polluting the lake.

The artist in the Overgaard garden is painter Mark Blong. The Albert Lea native teaches art at Sibley Elementary.

“I enjoy painting with a variety of mediums, but my favorite is watercolor. I like the immediacy and transparent quality it provides,” Blong said. “My outdoor activities serve as an inspiration to my art.”

Deane and Kay Christianson

Over the past 13 years, the Christiansons have transformed a tree-covered hillside into a peaceful sanctuary. They now have 13 flower beds and a small plot for vegetables. Their favorite area includes a bench, bridge, houses and feeders for the birds.

The artist in the Christianson garden is painter Mary Sparks Schulte. She has been teaching art for 14 years and has been a working artist for 18 years.

“The element of design I truly like to experiment with is color, with unnaturally bright colors in my work,” Schulte said. “I have continually turned to the Fauvist Period for inspiration, especially the works of Matisse.”
Cathy Porter and Steve Bonine

This garden features a series of terraces containing hostas, astilbe, phlox, spiderwort, barberry and rhododendrons. The view is of their pond and distant fields. West of the pond is a vegetable garden and prairie restoration project. New landscaping includes a small kitchen garden for herbs and tomatoes and beds along the driveway for perennials and native plants.

Quilter Cathy Porter is the artist in the garden. “I grew up loving scrap quilts made by my grandmothers, who taught me to sew,” she said. “Some are traditional patterns like Irish chain or Baltimore pavement, using cottons I’ve purchased or inherited. Others contain fabrics I’ve purchased specifically for a family member’s interests, the pattern determined by the fabrics themselves.” Her husband, Steve Bonine, machine-quilts them.

Jim and Debbie Viktora

One might say the Viktora garden is an unofficial welcome to Hollandale as people enter the town from the west. The Viktora garden includes several small ponds with metal sculptures, old barn wood bird houses on twisting cedar stumps, a trumpet vine gazebo, a miniature windmill, a little red barn and an underground watering system. There are more than 600 plants on the property. The Viktoras will have the Dutch treat, oliebollen, for visitors to sample as well as lemonade.

Rock painter Susan DeVries is the artist in the Viktora garden. “As a child, I was fascinated by rocks. I spent every possible moment scouring the roads and gravel pits where I grew up looking for agates or other unusual stones,” she said. “I enjoy painting a variety of animals on rocks, which involves a lot of searching for just the right one.”

Hank Helfter

Hank Helfter is a passionate gardener and multi-dimensional artist. He created the stained glass pieces on his deck. Helfter’s acreage alongside a stream includes hundreds of perennials, zone-friendly ornamentals, some rare plants rescued from his grandmother’s garden, an arbor, a serenity path through a grove, a walled garden and even a sharing garden for plants he gives to friends.

On Friday, the artist in Helfter’s garden will be Peg Shelton and her drawings. After retiring from nursing, Shelton was introduced to watercolor by Brownsville, Texas, artist Doolie Rule. She also studied with Kansas City portrait artist Janice G. Hancock Thompson.

“After working with several media in college, my favorite remains working with pencil,” Shelton said. “Art, however, is a hobby for me. My passion is using my nursing skills in working with the elderly.”

On Saturday, multimedia artist Gilbert Johnson will be the artist in the Helfter garden. Johnson, an Albert Lea native, has been drawing since he was very young.

“Art has given me a way to express my feelings without having to describe or explain them in detail,” he said. “I have found that art has given me the possibility to share parts of who I am with almost anyone and that is has no barriers.”

Matt and Connie Kermes

The Kermes family grows mostly corn and soybeans but saves time and energy for beautifying the area around the house. Rocks picked out of their fields line garden paths and a stream bed. There is an arbor, bench, fish pond with waterwheel and picnic area with fire ring. A vegetable garden is next to a new project — a back-to-nature acre, which will someday be full of native plants and wildflowers.

Quilter Ce-Ce Brekke is the artist in the Kermes garden. She began making doll clothes using feed sacks and sewing on an old treadle machine. She recently started paper piecing and machine embroidery.

“It really helped in 2009 when I won the local Marie Osmond/Janome Sewing Machine competition with a wall hanging,” she said. “The best part is the many friends I’ve made.”