the art of garden-making, with dan benarcik

THE FLYER PIQUED MY INTEREST: Dan Benarcik, part of the creative team at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania (a must visit!), would be lecturing nearby about “The Art & Craft of the Garden,” and how to personalize a garden using artistic elements, found artifacts, and ornamental containers. I quickly got a ticket—you can, too, for the June 16 event, including garden tours and a garden market, in Spencertown, New York—but also asked Dan to share some of his ideas and images (including the bromeliad-artemisia- urn-and-melianthus moment at Chanticleer, above) with us, no matter whether we can attend. A Q&A with this enormously talented plantsman and garden artist.

Q. First, tell us a little about Dan Benarcik, and especially how it is that such an accomplished horticulturist finds himself lecturing about art in the garden (not just a big, long plant list!). Where did the two dots connect—or are they even two different dots?

A.  I believe they are two dots, just not very far from each other.

I grew up with one foot in the flower shop (my mother is a third-generation florist and cut flower grower), and the woodshop (my father and his brothers opened one of the first postwar DIY-type stores in Wilmington, Delaware). Interestingly, it was the common thread of customer service (read: customer experience) that was held in the highest regard growing up. And showing people what and how they could make their lives and situations better by a little hands-on aesthetic improvement.

A side note: My sister is an NYC-based artist who works in three-dimensional organic installations, and my brother is a Seattle-based architect, who teaches and designs/builds furniture as dept. head in a community college. We all have our mediums that we