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Music and Gardening
In Tune With Nature
(Originally Published: March/April 2004)
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be in tune with nature? A gardener knows. She knows when the garden seems a little off-key or when a blooming tree in a spring landscape hits the right note.
Christine Peick has learned that finding the perfect pitch in her garden on 5 1D2 acres outside Columbia, Illinois, just east of St. Louis, isn't all that different from finding it when she's on stage as a professional singer.
"I don't think I would know so much about music if I hadn't known about gardening and vice versa," says Christine, lead singer for Raven Moon, a St. Louis-based bluegrass band. "Gardening taught me a deep sense of concentration on elements of form, balance and beauty. I find I can fold that into my music."
In spring, purple redbuds, and dogwoods and crabapples with pink or white blooms, reflect on the placid surface of a C-shaped lake. The rural landscape is home not only to Christine and her husband, Bill, but to three cats and numerous wild ducks, geese, muskrats, deer and turkeys. Close to their low-slung, Mediterranean-influenced house, the garden design is formal, but it evolves into a natural, wilder look farther away.
Cherubs, obelisks, statues, benches and family antiques, such as an old sundial, dot her flower beds, adding interest, no matter what's in bloom. Christine often whitewashes or paints concrete pieces to create an aged look.
"To me, gardening and music are a lot alike; they both have a sense of rhythm and timing and coordination of beautiful effects," Christine says.
Bluegrass, she notes, is music you can play on a porch with wooden instruments, no drums, and little amplification. "The wood instruments capture the magic that you find in the trees," she says. Which leads to one of her favorite topics. "Trees are my big thing," says Christine, who plants at least 50 trees and shrubs—selected for their foliage, flowers or both—every year.
"I've been planting trees since I was little. I think everyone should plant trees."
Everyone knows you should plant trees, but they don't really think about why.
"I think they're overlooked as far as color and texture," Christine says. "When you have a big yard, you can't afford to buy enough plants for blooms everywhere. You have to work with the color of the foliage of trees and shrubs. To contrast greens against each other is really important."
