Garden Visit: Ceramicist Marcia Donahue’s Playful and Surreal Outdoor Gallery in Berkeley
Garden Visit: Ceramicist Marcia Donahue’s Playful and Surreal Outdoor Gallery in Berkeley
Garden Visit: Ceramicist Marcia Donahue’s Playful and Surreal Outdoor Gallery in Berkeley
Ever been to a garden that you feel compelled to visit again and again because you discover surprising new things—curious curios, fantastic foliage, powerful plant pairings—each time?
Marcia has lived and gardened at her Berkeley home for 44 years, and all her care and fine-tuning, and passion for storytelling with plants and garden art really shine through.
Join me as we take a look around:
An example of Marcia’s “real but not alive” ceramic mushrooms.
Throughout the garden, you’ll find not-quite mushrooms and hybrid varieties of ‘bambusa ceramica’—ceramics all with a pinch of realism and a splash of humor—sprouting up unexpectedly through the lushness and punctuating the spaces between plants.
An oversized mala drapes over a tree.
Twelve bantam chickens of various breeds have free rein over Marcia’s garden.
“Though little bantam chickens scratch, eat plants, and poop, they do it in a smaller way than full-sized chickens.” Marcia keeps her chickens from getting into her pots and mussing things up by planting bromeliads under and around more susceptible plants; pretty rocks and clay sculptures also minimize the damage.
Marcia is a master of reuse: note the horseshoes and bowling balls that she artfully integrated into her landscape design.