garden sculpture | Deborah Silver & Co.

Thirty Years

It was 30 years ago last night that Rob and I were hosting an opening preview celebration for Deborah Silver and Company’s new venture – Detroit Garden Works. This brand new company would make fine, whimsical, intriguing, memorable and shockingly beautiful ornament for the garden available to keen gardeners of all persuasions. Ha. It was a good thing we had ideas and determination, as it would take all of that and then some to make this wish come true. By “then some”, I mean the 10 years after the opening that it took to get the shop centered, fully off the ground, and firmly in the black. We fought for it. Sincerely.

My landscape design/build firm, Deborah Silver and Company, opened for business in 1986, a decade earlier. Though the vast majority of my landscape design work revolved around the instinct to sculpt ground and install beautifully designed landscapes and gardens to life on the surfaces of that sculpted ground, I felt like a certain element was missing. An interest in art and sculpture meant I had an interest in ornament for the garden. What do I mean by that? Any object which represents a significant memory or a point of view about what is beautiful or emotionally important can imbue a landscape with atmosphere. A landscape with atmosphere is all I have ever hoped to make. Though I was keen to include this ornamental layer in my landscape design and installation projects, precious little was available.

Rob joined the landscape company in 1992, after completing his degree in landscape architecture at Michigan State University. It became clear early on that his landscape design work was austere, complex, yet casually offhand. Years later, he knows how to make a subtle and gracefully constructed arrangement look as if he dashed it off in a moment. No matter how long he labors over and reworks anything he does, it will be perfectly convincing. He is a proponent and champion of a sparse look that always hovers just over and on the right side of weedy. That early mix of modernism and mess confounded me, and drove me crazy. No design project of his ever came to a definitive close. Clients wanting direction that had parameters in mind got his tinkering with no boundaries. How did we resolve those early years, co-designing ? He had a romance going on with the garden like no other person I had ever met. I reserved judgment. This is one of the better decisions I have ever made. I truly admired his point of view. A commitment to that took me a long way. The idea that we would open a shop devoted to fine quality ornament for the garden was an idea we came to share. That he would do all of the buying for the store is that one decision that keeps us here 30 years later.

In the fall of 1992, Rob had a winter trip planned to Czechoslovakia to ski. I financed a side trip, a very casually weedy trip, to scout European ornament that might be of interest to us, and to our clients. 2 pallets representing the sum total of his shopping arrived months later. It was exhilarating. We knew the right collection of pots or sculpture could organize a landscape. An antique garden ornament saturates the immediate environment with a sense of another time and place – history. Vintage farm troughs recall that time when agriculture was so much a part of every life. Vintage ornament of an agricultural history satisfies that longing for connection to nature. Contemporary sculpture in the garden can evoke an appreciation of form, mass, and texture in a very direct and abstracted way. I wanted the perfect bench, the most striking container, and topiary forms that would work while they were being beautiful-for my landscapes. I knew that Rob would take this on.

Now, Rob buys for Detroit Garden Works. He attends the flea markets, fairs and factories. He has relationships with garden antique dealers, both in the US and abroad. He makes a point of visiting nurseries and specialty growers everywhere he goes. He makes it a point to meet the people who make things for gardens. He gives them the time and space to speak to their craft. What eventually makes its way to Detroit Garden Works in the spring of each year is a very carefully curated collection that has been assembled with a discerning eye.

His shopping is always about the stories of the people. The antiques dealers with a long history of collecting. The person who carves words into the oak boards that comprise her garden furniture pieces. The people whose pottery is still making pots going on two hundred years later. The artisan who is creating their own special brand of ornament. The dealer who has taken the time to make very fine quality reproductions of classic garden ornament. The armillary sphere maker whose attention to the science, physics, and fabrication warrants a closer look. I greatly admire how he takes the buying to heart. That big heart of his has made Detroit Garden Works a destination for gardeners of every persuasion.

Detroit Garden Works is in the business of offering beautiful ornament for the garden. Still. It could be antique. It could be vintage, and funky vintage. It could be of a French, American or Italian flavor. It could be of English origin, through and through. It could be new, with a particular point of view. It could be fun or funny. It could be contemporary. It could be arts and crafts or mid century modern inspired. It could be Belgian in origin-old, vintage, or new. It could be none of the above, just sitting here waiting for that one particular gardening client to lay claim to it. When you come here, you’ll see.

Posted on: March 30, 2026 51 Comments

Filed Under: the garden, garden sculpture, Parties and Events, Garden Ornament, Detroit Garden Works Tagged With: pergolas and arbors, garden containers, garden pots, Garden Ornament, Garden Design, Garden Furniture, Detroit Garden Works, gardening

Ringing In The 2025 Winter Season

It is probably close to 15 years ago that Rob wrapped a vintage steel tractor tire hoop with a string of incandescent holiday lights, and hung it in a tree. On a whim, I might add. A hank of ten ends jute attached to the top of the ring at one end, and a stout branch of the tree on the other end, also provided cover for the electrical cord at the end of the light string that would run across the top of the branch and back to the main trunk. Once that cord dropped to the ground, an extension cord would deliver the electricity needed to light up that ring. So unexpectedly beautiful -a lighted circle effortlessly suspended from a branch of a tree. With no apparent source of electricity. Magic, this. And not to mention simple. One lighted ring 3′ in diameter would speak loud and clear to the holiday and winter season ahead – every day and all through the night.

In its most basic form, a circle is a powerful and compelling shape. It has no beginning or end. The history and importance of the circle in art, engineering, music, mathematics, astronomy, design and so on dates back centuries. There is much more to the symbolism and meaning of a circle than its geometry. Very little of human endeavour does not touch on or recall the circle in some way. Every circle I design in to a landscape recalls all of that history. A circle has an aura that comes with it. Every lighted circle displayed over the winter and holiday season makes that aura visible.

That first lighted hoop gave way to a channel steel version designed by Rob in various sizes, and manufactured for Detroit Garden Works. Later came his rather brilliant design for a spiked hoop held aloft by a steel rectangle whose four long rod steel legs could be inserted into the soil in a pot or in the ground. Lighted hoops featured in winter and holiday pots and container arrangements delighted my clients. They have become a mainstay of our winter season. Soon we were shipping the lighted rings all over the country. I was so pleased to see our gardening clientele coming to Detroit Garden Works to shop for materials for that 4th season. The winter.

Those original hanging light rings from years ago did a brave job of keeping the dreary part of the winter at bay. The dark part, that is. Having moved the design and construction of our winter container arrangements indoors means we have time to study on the design and construction. The time constraints of the winter container season is an invitation to hurry. Hurried work can look hurried. So we have had some time to study on those light rings, and think about how else we could use them. Or what we could add to them.

It was inevitable that given enough time and exposure, we would start to tinker with that basic light ring. Maybe a different style of light would change things up. Perhaps the ring could be a structure – an armature upon which something else beautiful and sculptural could be built. For this project, the lighted ring was lined with a diminutive evergreen garland that would connect that steel circle visually with the evergreens populating the box. The circle is stronger, and is a more important part of the composition, given the additional emphasis that the garland provides. The trio of over scaled steel pine cones that Rob had sourced overseas anchors the ring to the ground plane of the box.

Each of the four light rings are immersed in alternating rows of red bud pussy willow stems. Two fingers between each branch is how we space them. That thicket softens the geometry of the circle. It provides some mystery. The mass of them soften the light shining back into the windows. The twigs, and greens surrounding them suggest a garden environment – similar to and reminiscent of those places outdoors that gardeners treasure. Needless to say, I have clients that keep their light rings powered up all year round. Given how little power the LED lights draw, there is no reason not to enjoy them all winter long.

Whether the weather obliges with one inch or 10 inches of snow, the rings will keep beaming.

Posted on: January 2, 2025 55 Comments

Filed Under: Winter, garden sculpture, Lighting, Holiday, Garden Ornament, Detroit Garden Works

Sailing Close To The Wind

I recently ran across some pictures of holiday containers from the year 2000. The year 2000? I was faint with surprise. It is impossible to believe that we have just finished our 21st season designing, fabricating and installing winter arrangements in pots and containers, but indeed we have. I would have guessed we had 10 years into it, at most. It seems those decades flew by. How is it possible to have sustained a keen interest in the work for that many years, much less kept it fresh and innovative?

Of course one’s approach to the work evolves with experience. In the early days we installed all of the materials in containers on site, in very cold and otherwise inhospitable conditions. All of the materials were inserted into the soil. It took a few years to rewrite that protocol, but now all of the work is done indoors, in custom made forms that are saved and reused from year to year. If you read here regularly, you have heard all about this before. We have a broker of excellent repute and outstanding service supply us with evergreen boughs of incredible size and heft. The picture above and below tell the story of those greens. The dry, preserved and faux materials we are able to add to our arrangements have become more sophisticated and more wide ranging over the years. The materials themselves suggest and inform the design. Great materials enable great work – so all my best to you, and thank you, Rob. But what the 21 years we have in to designing and fabricating the winter pots got me to thinking about has to do with aesthetics. The art and sculpture of it, if you will.

In the beginning we had our mandate – even though we may not have been so conscious of it. Being gardeners, the most beautiful arrangements of greens would of course be those arrangements that most closely replicated the natural arrangement of greens in living and growing evergreen trees and shrubs. Those arrangements engineered by nature have evolved to maximize the health and well being of the plant, and future generations of that plant. Our goal was to arrange cut greens to look as though they were part of a live tree, and growing. We would try to copy nature in exacting detail. There are winter containers we have done that appear to have evergreen shrubs growing in them. We’ve been asked about how to water them more than just a few times. Clients would admire that we were able to make our winter containers look real. Though nature’s works are extraordinarily sculptural, they are after all, nature’s works, and not ours. How would we improve on what nature had already done? We wouldn’t. But we could interpret, celebrate and document our relationship with nature in any number of ways.

Considering the possibility of arranging greens in a not necessarily natural way was uncharted territory. We needed to go in that direction, but that process was like sailing a sailboat directly in to the wind. A sailboat is able to make forward progress into a headwind by a process called tacking. The boat is moved across the wind by turning the bow towards and through the wind in one direction, and then back across the wind in the other. This zig zag movement, if it is skillfully done, has a strong forward component. It produces progress towards a desired destination. If the turning into the wind is of a slight and subtle angle, rather than a sharp 90 degree turn, it produces a phenomena known as sailing close to the wind. Meaning a very small change can make forward progress possible. To anyone reading who truly is a sailor, I apologize for this shallow discussion of tacking. But even a oversimplified version of it helps to explain how our work has evolved creatively.

What are our headwinds? Being reluctant to entertain change is the strongest. Sometimes a lack of imagination or a loss of interest can whip up a stiff headwind. The arrangement pictured above was notable for us, as we deliberately inserted the evergreen boughs adjacent to the centerpiece in a vertical position. It was the first time in at least 15 years – taking that tack. The very first picture in this post illustrates that clearly. The moment we were able to set branches at a horizontal angle in a rigid foam armature, we abandoned ever setting branches vertically again. We were free from the demands imposed by constructing arrangements in the soil. But one set of freedom enabled another kind of prison-not assessing each project on the merits. We made this incrementally small change in our construction protocol for this pot ostensibly to conceal the faux stems of our faux picks. But the consequences of this small change-the impulse to go vertical in this pot – proved to be substantial. The overall shape was very different-gorgeous to my eye. Natasha did an incredible job setting the greens in this pot. Stunning. Her attention to detail and understanding of mass, volume and shape is obvious.

The following photographs detail the construction of winter arrangements for a set of window boxes that we did last year. It is clear from the pictures that the greens have been set at angles that respond to the geometry of the light ring in the center. The light ring was lined with a heavy weight boxwood garland, that visually connects to the shaped boxwood that follows the radius of the bottom of the light ring. How the boxwood is installed makes the light ring look integral to the arrangement-in a sculptural way. Boxwood would not grow like this, but it might live like this were it trimmed. That would endow the boxwood with the evidence of the human hand. Noble fir branches would not grow like this either. It is clear that this arrangement is of a different sort. And it is definitely not a representation of a noble fir tree.

There are those who might say that the evidence of the human hand is greatly inferior to the hand of nature. I don’t subscribe to that notion, as I do not see the two forces as comparable. They are relatable, integral to one another, but different. Equally interesting. Equally essential.

This picture taken in the shop after the construction was finished illustrates to my mind how a winter arrangement can be sculptural. It took a while to convince Birdie that it would be good and beautiful to install the long greens with an upward trajectory. Like angel wings. What an incredibly beautiful job she did. Ten minutes in, she knew exactly where she was going. Right into the wind.

It was a perfect moment, looking at these sculptures at days end when everyone had gone home. We would install them the following day.

Install them we did.

Posted on: January 17, 2022 23 Comments

Filed Under: Deborah Silver and Co Inc, garden sculpture, Winter, container planting, Holiday, Seasonal

Beauty

A client came in last week wearing a tee shirt that had the word BEAUTY printed across it. A few days later her Mom came in, wearing the same shirt. I have no idea as to the origin, intent or meaning of that word having been printed on that shirt. I did not ask. But it did set me to thinking about beauty. And how the pursuit and appreciation of it has been a life’s work, and the source of so much pleasure and satisfaction. Like many others, I came to be a gardener from an intense interest and fascination with the natural world. The visual drama of an emerging leaf, the impossibly intense blue color of a delphinium flower, the fragrance of a mock orange in bloom, the shape of an ancient beech tree-everything about the life of plants provides vigorous exercise and engagement to all of the senses. It is not at all unusual to know of a gardener swooning over this or that flower. So normal in my circle and probably yours. The beauty of nature provides a profound pleasure for the heart, hand, and soul, if you will.

A definitive explanation of what constitutes beauty is next to impossible, as it does not exist in a vacuum. A beauty designation is entirely arbitrary and fiercely personal. There is a unique relationship between the observer and the observed. What is seen and what is there to be seen. There are those gardeners who adore green flowers or spring ephemera, and those who wax poetic about hot pink peonies, yellow dahlias and red hibiscus. There are others that would be hard pressed to name a plant they don’t like, just as there are those who think that a beautiful landscape would by definition be confined to hellebores and beech trees. Zinnias are most beautiful to me in large part as they remind me of my Mom. Everyone has their own closely held ideas about what is beautiful.

What constitutes beauty in a garden is a topic of endless discussion. Gardeners and designers of gardens fiercely debate the fine points, and acknowledge their common ground. I admire some gardens and landscapes more than others, as some are more beautiful to me than others. Whether it be plants, houses, landscapes, art, books, music, bridges or… garden pots, a need for beauty has always been an integral part of the human experience. It is as simple and as complex as that.
It has been my good fortune over the years to come in contact with ornament for the garden of great beauty. I owe most of that exposure to Rob, who has been shopping and buying for Detroit Garden Works since before it opened in 1996. It is our 25th year in business this year. I find it remarkable that a modestly sized garden shop in the Midwest has not only survived for that long, it has prospered – buying and selling objects and plants of beauty for the garden. That beauty designation by Rob might include something smart and forward thinking. Some other item might be redolent of the earthy odor of history, sassy and off center, or strongly evocative of a farm garden. His is a very discerning eye, and his range of expertise in his field has been amassed over a long period of time. Opening the shop all those years ago was about wanting to share that aesthetic with other gardeners, and make beautiful garden ornament available to others. That is what we do – celebrate the beauty of the garden.
Which brings me to a discussion of these pots. They are of French manufacture. A poterie that has been in business since the late nineteenth century has evolved from a company making terra cotta roof and drain tiles to a fine art studio creating pots of great beauty for the garden. The poterie was built but 300 meters from their clay quarry. There is precious little about them that is not to like. The sculptural shapes are classically French. The designs date back centuries. Each pot is hand made, and signed by the artisan who made it.

The pots are made via an ancient process. Heavy rope is coiled around a wood form that describes the shape of the pot being made. The clay is pressed onto and into that rope form, until the desired thickness and shape is reached. As the clay dries, it shrinks away from the rope form. That rope is saved for another day, another pot. The success of this incredibly simple process depends on a potter of great skill and experience to make a pot of uniform thickness and integrity that can withstand the great heat of the firing process.

This particular finish is a tour de force. The top third of the exterior of the pots, the rims and interiors of each, is drenched in a thick creamy and lustrous glaze that looks good enough to eat. The body of the pots has a thinly applied ceramic matte patina comprised of many shades of cream, taupe and gray. There are places where the red clay body shows through. The cloud like appearance and texture of this finish is hard to describe. I like that. Any object whose beauty defies description will continue to enchant. The surface of each pot is its own painting.

The contrasting surfaces are as appealing to the touch as they are to the eye.
This picture makes it clear that each pot is hand made. Each one of these olive jars is subtly different in shape and size than its neighbor.