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The Living Medium — When Plants Become Art

Art for garden

There are two ways to bring art into a garden. You can place an object inside it — a sculpture, a bench, a carved stone — and the garden becomes its setting. Or you can treat the garden itself as the artwork, and the plants as the medium.

At Art for Garden, an initiative of Studio Umilys, we do both. But it is the second that defines us: the quiet, slow, living art made of leaves, branches, light and seasons.

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Plants, treated as a medium 

A medium is anything an artist uses to think with. Paint, bronze, clay, wood. Each has its own logic — what it resists, what it allows, what it does over time. The vegetal is a medium in exactly this sense, with one extraordinary property: it keeps moving after the artist has stopped.

When we design a garden at Studio Umilys, or curate a piece for Art for Garden, we work with that movement. A hornbeam hedge (Carpinus betulus) is pruned into a clean horizontal line — and for a few months a year it behaves like architecture. Then autumn arrives, the leaves turn russet, and the same line becomes a painting. Then winter strips it bare, and it becomes a drawing.

The same object has been three different artworks in a single year, without ever being touched.

"Creating art from natural materials is a fascinating cycle — transforming raw elements into reflections of thought, or even mirrors of the soul." — Lorenzo del Marmol 

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Aneomon art for garden

What the vegetal makes us think about

The reason we return to plants, again and again, is not only that they are beautiful. It is that they are honest about things we tend to look away from. Spending real time in a garden — not crossing it, not photographing it, but being in it — quietly returns us to six fundamental questions.

TimeSeasons and colourCycle of life and deathLightSensesInstinct & Origin

Time

A hedge takes ten years to become itself. An oak takes a human lifetime. Nothing in a serious garden happens on the scale of a notification. To plant is to accept that the most meaningful results belong to a future you may not fully see — and to find that acceptable, even beautiful. The garden teaches patience the way almost nothing else in modern life does.   



Seasons and colour

A garden is never finished, because it is never the same. Spring is green and white. Summer is heavy and saturated. Autumn burns. Winter draws in black ink. The same view — from the same window — rewrites itself four times a year, and then starts again. Nothing made of bronze or canvas can do this. The vegetal forces us to notice change, rather than resent it.  



Cycle of life and death

Plants make no effort to hide what they are doing. They grow, they flower, they fade, they fall, they feed the soil that will grow the next generation. Compost is not a metaphor — it is the literal, working mechanism of a garden. Living alongside that honesty is quietly reassuring. It reframes endings as passages, and decay as a form of participation. 

Light

Every plant is, in a sense, a sculpture of light. A grass catches the low sun and glows. A canopy filters the light into green. A clipped yew absorbs it and becomes almost black. When we compose a garden, we are not placing objects in space — we are placing light-catchers, and the artwork is what happens between them at 7 a.m. and at 7 p.m., in June and in December.

Senses

A painting is seen. A garden is smelled, heard, touched, walked through. A box hedge warmed by the sun has a scent — dry, faintly feline, impossible to describe and impossible to forget. Wet earth after rain is almost a drug. Grass under bare feet, the sound of poplars in wind, the bitterness of a crushed bay leaf between the fingers — gardens engage the whole sensory body, not only the eye. This is something no indoor artwork can offer.

Instinct & Origin

Before we were anything else, we were a species that lived in landscapes. The part of us that relaxes in a garden, that feels something shift when we see a clearing in a wood or a pond in the evening, is older than language. A well-made garden speaks to that layer. It does not explain — it recognises. This is why a good garden feels, on some level, like coming home to a place you have never been.

How this shapes what we do

This way of thinking is not decorative. It affects every concrete decision we make, both at Art for Garden and at Studio Umilys.

When we select a sculpture for the Art for Garden collection, we ask two questions. Is it beautiful on its own? And — just as important — does it enter into dialogue with the vegetal around it? A piece that dominates the planting is placed; a piece that converses with it is installed.

When we design a landscape at Studio Umilys, the same logic runs in reverse. A topiaried cloud of box, a single multi-stem Amelanchier, a curved line of miscanthus — these are chosen, shaped and positioned like sculptures. The planting plan is, in effect, an exhibition plan. Except the exhibition changes every week.

What we are building, in both cases, is the same thing: a place where the line between "the garden" and "the art" softens until it is no longer useful to draw it. 

Frequently asked questions

We mean that plants are treated the same way a sculptor treats bronze or a painter treats pigment: as a material with its own logic, capable of being composed into an intentional, expressive work. A clipped hedge, a pruned tree, a drift of perennials — each is a deliberate artistic choice, not only a functional one. Unlike other media, the vegetal continues to evolve after the artist has stopped, making every living composition a slow, seasonal artwork.

A traditional outdoor gallery places artworks inside a garden setting. Art for Garden, together with its sister Studio Umilys, works in both directions: we curate outdoor sculptures and objects that dialogue with living plants, and we treat the planting itself as a medium, designing gardens where the vegetal composition is the primary artwork.

Art for Garden is the curatorial platform of Studio Umilys, a landscape and garden design studio based in Belgium. Studio Umilys designs the living landscapes; Art for Garden selects the sculptures, objects and pieces that integrate into them. Both are initiatives of Vert Val SRL, based in La Hulpe (Brabant Wallon) and Overijse (Vlaams Brabant), working throughout Belgium and Brussels.

Yes, and it has been for centuries — from Japanese temple gardens to Le Nôtre's compositions at Versailles, from the English landscape movement to the naturalistic plantings of Piet Oudolf. What distinguishes a garden as art from a garden as decoration is intention: deliberate composition, a point of view, and the understanding that the vegetal is a material capable of expressing ideas about time, light, memory and impermanence.

Because they show it openly. A plant grows, flowers, fades, and returns to the soil in a visible cycle that unfolds across months and years. Unlike a manufactured object, a plant cannot hide that it is alive and that it will change. Spending time in a well-designed garden quietly reconnects us to the scale of natural time — patience, seasons, growth, decay — which is the opposite scale from the one most of our daily life operates on.

Both, because they are inseparable. Studio Umilys designs private gardens and landscape projects in Belgium, with a particular focus on Brabant Wallon, Brussels and Vlaams Brabant. Art for Garden curates outdoor sculptures, vessels and decorative pieces selected to live alongside those designs. Clients can engage us for a full landscape project, for curated objects, or for both together.

A garden is the only artwork you walk inside, the only one you smell, the only one that does half of the work itself. That is what we design, and that is what we collect. 
Lorenzo del Marmol
Lorenzo del Marmol 

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