A tame and tidy nest

Today J and I drove to Salem, MA to visit the Peabody Essex Museum. Before we went inside, we took a detour around the block to see What the Birds Know, a stickwork installation by Patrick Dougherty.

Dougherty is the same artist who created The Wild Rumpus, a stickwork installation I’d seen at Tower Hill Botanic Garden (and subsequently blogged) last October. Although the two pieces are crafted from the same materials and share a similar whimsical vision, their markedly different surrounding make for two distinctly different impressions.

The Wild Rumpus is located in the woodsy shade alongside a sunny field: the “middle of nowhere” if you’re a child walking with your parents. Inspired by the classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, Dougherty’s Tower Hill installation feels wild, or at least woodsy. Looking through its wicker-like windows, you half expect to see deer or other shy forest creatures staring back at you.

What the Birds Know, on the other hand, is at the corner of a busy intersection in downtown Salem. Tucked into a tiny yard next to a historic house, What the Birds Know is surrounded by neighboring buildings and receives lots of visitors. (J and I had driven past it last October, when Salem was thronged with Halloween tourists, and we didn’t even try to photograph it.)

Dougherty’s Salem installation doesn’t feel wild, but cozy: a cluster of neat little houses tucked right alongside human habitations. What the birds of downtown Salem presumably know is how to make a tame and tidy nest right alongside the comings and goings of preoccupied human beings.

 

Where the wild things are

If I had tried to pick the perfect day for a first visit to Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts, Saturday would have probably been it. Saturday was a quintessential New England autumn day, with a brisk breeze, azure skies, and a brilliant backdrop of fall foliage. It was a perfect sweatshirt weather, and the grounds (which I trust are beautiful in all seasons) were resplendent with mid-October color.

A (not her real initial) and I went to Tower Hill on Saturday to see The Wild Rumpus, a stickwork installation by Patrick Dougherty. Woven together from local saplings, The Wild Rumpus looks like a cross between a castle and a bird nest, with multiple rooms, windows, and passageways culminating in several twisted towers.

The title of Dougherty’s installation alludes to Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, and The Wild Rumpus does indeed look like the lair of a rumpus-making monster. The woodsy paths leading to and from the installation were dotted with signs with laminated pages from Sendak’s book, as if inviting children to act out their own version of young Max’s mischief-making.

The handful of children A and I saw inspecting The Wild Rumpus up close seemed undecided about it: several seemed scared to approach it, but others enjoyed creeping and peeking through its wicker-like walls, at least after some reassurance from their parents. The monsters in Where the Wild Things Are might look scary, but they are lovable once Max gets to know them, and Dougherty’s stickwork structure is similarly inscrutable, it not being immediately clear whether friendly fairies or wicked witches live here.

It turns out a house made of sticks offers the best of both worlds. Although the great outdoors are best for rumpus-making, a nest woven from saplings lets the outside stream straight in.