By Kathleen McCormick

	Crafted of hammered tin over wood, a canopied swing from India is the perfect throne for Rebecca DiDomenico’s children to survey their magical garden kingdom. Abalone-shell-embellished walls, a moongate, a Buddhist shrine, and climbing stones surround a Secret Garden the artist designed for her younger son.

Next to open space in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado, artist Rebecca DiDomenico is creating what she calls “a work in progress,” where art provides inspiration for the landscape and vice versa.

“The garden is an eclectic mix of all the things I’ve seen on my travels, the works of other artists and their gardens, and my own work,” she says. “I came to the garden like a natural canvas, creating it piece by piece.” She began many years ago after construction of the family’s contemporary barn-like home she designed with a local architect. “It’s daunting to take on a whole landscape at once, so I started with small parts.”

“I think of the garden as rooms,” says DiDomenico, many of them created for her two sons, now 11 and 7. One features a brick athanor, or alchemist’s oven, which looks like a tiny castle-keep. “I like having it in the garden because it’s an artifact, a vestige of a period of my artwork. It looks like a miniature world, like Alice in Wonderland.”

DiDomenico incorporates massive local stones into her designs. “I select stones for their sculptural qualities,” she notes. Among them are thick granite millstones from China used as stepping stones. “A Feng Shui artist told me that I had lots of creative spaces in my garden, but that I needed connections between them to help the flow of chi (energy).”

She designed a Secret Garden for her younger son. A high concrete wall erected by a neighbor prompted her creative response: mortar her side of the wall in cobalt blue, attach a small roofless room, and embellish both with iridescent shells. The family worked on the project for months, polishing bits of abalone shells with a cement mixer and then applying them to wet mortar to inscribe constellations and a Sufi poem. With antique metal grates for a door and windows, the Secret Garden suggests a medieval walled Moorish garden to delight children of any age.

Collaborating with DiDomenico “becomes a lifestyle,” says her husband Stephen Perry. “You create in the garden for periods of time; it’s a living piece of art.”