PHYLLIS ODESSEY
I began my career in the fine arts at the New York Studio School. I received a BA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and subsequently attended Parsons School of Design. I began my graphic design career at Time Warner as a Junior Art Director and rose to the position of Creative Director. Following a long career in graphic design, I studied garden and landscape design at The New York Botanical Garden. I worked on The Battery Bosque: the garden designed by Piet Oudolf for Battery Park. In 2020 became Director of Horticulture for Randall’s Island Park Alliance.
Winner of The Perennial Plant Association’s highest honor for landscape design, my education as a gardener began “by picking the bloated buds off my mother’s peony bushes.” I currently live in Vermont. I design gardens and work on my photography projects. I was President of the Board of The Vermont Center for Photography from 2020-2022. I am currently Art Curator for the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. I am more interested in structure, then individual plants. I approach every landscape with a painters eye. The starting point of my designs are site specific. I believe every landscape has a particular emotion. I am interested in seasonal change (winter decay and summer decadence); light and shadow; changes in topography as tools to create emotional resonance. My designs reinterpret traditional garden motifs. I believe all contemporary landscapes should be sustainable and respectful of the environment. Whether large or small; the gardens I design reflect the owner’s individuality.
I am a maker not a taker of photographs. My practice has evolved from photography to photo collages. My collages ask the viewer to participate in the process. You decide why a group of images are next to each other. In addition to hand cut photo collages (no photoshop here) my practice has evolved from strictly digital photography, in which every eyelash is visual, to integrating gel prints into my photo collages. The ways in which these two kinds of images can be integrated is what I am exploring right now.
“I know that I cannot make anything new. To make a garden is to organize all the elements present and add fresh ones, but first of all, I must absorb as best I can all that I see, the sky and the skyline, the soil, the colour of the grass and the shape and nature of the trees. Each half-mile of countryside has its own nature and every few yards is a reinterpretation. Each stone where it lies says something of the earth’s underlying structure; and the plants growing there, whether native or exotic, will indicate the vegetable chemistry of that one place.”
~ Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener
A Second Chance
from In the Eye of the Garden by Mirabel Osler, 1993
“Gardening is unique in many ways. Not only for the personal aura which it manifests, but because it is an occupation to which there is no end. Gardeners are always on their way, but never arriving. Unlike the poet or the architect, we cannot walk away from our creations. What a writer writes remains on the page, the painter’s brushwork, the architect’s building, or the composer’s score, passes from one century to another. A garden is temporal.
Yet this is the magic of gardening; we become enthralled however unaware we are of what is stealthily happening while we are dividing irises. Gardening is unique, too, for giving us a second chance. That doesn’t often happen in life. You cannot have another go with a job you have bungled, with the crucial advice you failed to take, or with the high-rise flats you have built; or even with a child you despair of, a husband, or the bailiffs.
But gardens, however disastrous, are beneficent.
The return of the seasons allows us to try again. Again and again – there is no end. What failed last summer can be attempted in the next. Even as the flower dies it is preparing for revival in spring. The continual cycle of decay and regeneration gives us forever the opportunity to broadcast fresh seeds, for there is one intrinsic truth: a garden never repeats itself. Never again can you have this year what you achieved in the last.”