GARDENING: Natural State

 

"I want no part of trends. I despise trends. I don’t follow them in the slightest. I do what I like,” says Robin Norris, the crusty creative force behind Campo de’ Fiori in Sheffield, Massachusetts, who has followed the same vision faithfully since the seventies. His business traces its roots to a shed on near Monument Mountain, from which Norris once sold organic vegetables, plants, and Mexican pottery. With respect to the green movement, Norris, who runs the company with his wife, Barbara Bockbrader, was way ahead of the curve.

 

The very word style, as it’s tossed around now, “makes Robin want to retch,” Bockbrader says. There’s a certain irony in that, because Campo is now at the forefront of the design trendline. No sooner is its catalog out than competitors are on planes to China to knock off its product line. This, too, raises Norris’s hackles.

 

But while others may pay lip service to going green, Norris and Bockbrader, a horticulturalist with a degree in agriculture from Cornell University who creates Campo’s inspiring organic gardens and demonstrates how to use the products her husband designs, have talked the talk and walked the walk for decades. Campo’s taproot runs very deep.

 

Like latter-day Baucis and Philemon, reincarnated as linden and oak, Bockbrader and Norris are assuredly more financially successful than their mythical antecedents, but just as earthy. They’re also self-effacing, more interested in their work than in having their photos in a magazine: even their catalogs only show pictures of their backs. Bockbrader is an unselfconscious natural beauty, deeply tanned, wearing no makeup, her hair the soft brown of an oak leaf in autumn, clad in sandals, brown socks, a spring-green shirt, and short khaki cargo skirt, slightly dirty from a morning of gardening. Norris, his face peppered with sun freckles and his long, silver hair bound into a ponytail, wears his jeans like a second skin.

 

Norris cultivated his aesthetic sensibility as a kid growing up after World War II in Snedens Landing, New York, a Hudson River hamlet inhabited by what he describes as “an eccentric bunch. The men built their own houses, some with thatched roofs. We’d leave doors open, so you’d go in and have something to eat, and leave a note.”

 

His parents’ neighbors were a group of intellectual, cultured, well-traveled American aristocrats whose artistic values favored the classical, the timeless, and the picturesque. Norris’s father was vice president of RCA International and, later, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. As a boy, Norris spent six years in Europe, attending school in Switzerland and England and living with his expatriate parents in London, who also had a country home in Kent. Then the family moved to Rome, into an old palazzo from which his mother and their cook would sally forth to the food and flower markets at the Eternal City’s Campo de’ Fiori piazza. Norris absorbed English and Continental—forgive the expression—style, through his pores.

 

Envisioning an eventual position as a diplomat, he began his career working on Wall Street. But the Vietnam War changed his perspective, and he became “a wandering poet with my three-legged dog, Magnolia,” he says, laughing. “She’d wag her little tail in the morning and we’d go that away. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.” Norris homesteaded on a Vermont farm for six years, and in 1983, he underwent a kidney transplant and settled full-time in the Berkshires to be nearer to Stockbridge friends and his Boston doctors. He became the assistant gardener at Indian Line Farm, the nation’s first CSA, in Egremont, Massachusetts, and spent the cold months visiting Indian tribes in Mexico, using his 1978 Ford pickup (which he still has) to bring back items to sell.

 

Bockbrader’s trajectory landed her in the same place, geographically and philosophically. She grew up on an Ohio dairy farm and intended to be a doctor or a philosopher and live in a big city. She started college with this plan in mind, but when the career path didn’t feel right to her she dropped out to get her bearings and returned to Cornell to earn a degree in agriculture, focusing on horticulture and entymology. Visiting her college boyfriend’s grandmother in Egremont, she found that she “liked the way it looked at dusk.” Upon graduating thirty-five years ago, trusting her instincts, she moved to the Berkshires, taking on gardening clients, waitressing, and then supplying cut flowers to the Old Mill. Eventually, this grew into a floral design service for the Old Mill, Blantyre, Aubergine, and wedding clients.

 

Norris and Bockbrader met in the 1980s through mutual friends. He asked questions about horticulture and showed her the terra-cotta pots he was importing from Mexico. Then he left her a phone message asking, “Do you enjoy theater, and do you have an evening gown?” In response, she left her own message: “Yes and no.” Now the couple has two teenage children, and the conversation about containers and which plants will do best in each continues, defining an important aspect of their creative partnership.

 

Campo de’ Fiori, Italian for “field of flowers,” pays tribute to both Norris’s appreciation for classical antiquity and Bockbrader’s passion for horticulture. “We’re very lucky to live here and do what we do,” he says.

 

One contribution the company makes to its small corner of the planet is its restoration of topsoil and the organic garden environment on its four-acre site in Sheffield. There’s also the nature of its products, which are handmade from iron, bronze, glass, cast concrete, wood, and clay—all materials that will decompose when they eventually return to the earth. Cast-concrete birdhouses, vases, benches, and wide containers that mimic the mortars used by Indian tribes in Mexico for grinding grain by hand appear to have been fashioned from blocks of old mesquite wood, but will last longer when exposed to weather.

 

The company manufactures near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and also sells the work of Berkshire craftspeople, such as woodcrafter Bradley Weatherup and metalworker Bob Keating. Along the staircase of the showroom building, black-and-white photographs of flowers by Dag Sheer resonate with the Campo de’ Fiori product line; on display tables are gardening and art books focusing on the natural world, among them a volume about the work of Berkshire-based painter Walton Ford.

 

Norris’s designs stem from his lifelong dedication to ecology. This year, following its animal forms of previous seasons, Campo’s new products offer a close-up look at seed pods, with moss-encrusted flower pots and cast-iron candleholders imitating poppy, clematis, campanula, lotus, pinecone, acorn, and artichoke shapes. Glass spheres that can hold a single exotic stem mimic giant drops of water, while multifaceted lighting fixtures imitate stars. This is a direct result of Norris’s interest in physics and what he calls “the single point from which everything unfolds.”

 

“No one really understands how the seeds of DNA or RNA of a plant or animal know what it is to become. The laws of nature will continue to mystify us,” he says. “The greatest thing we’ve been given is this mystery. We should embrace that and enjoy it. This is the potential for paradise.”

 

Bockbrader, her husband says, “is moving all the time. She doesn’t have an off switch.” This mistress of applied aesthetics, gardens, merchandising, and garden consulting is the rarest of combinations: moving and talking all the time, yet completely grounded and calm—like a human still point from which things unfold.

 

Leading a visitor through the gardens, Bockbrader points out the tall cast-iron stakes imitating garlic scapes, used to elevate a hose so it doesn’t trample plants while watering; names various plants, noting which need to winter in the greenhouse; and enumerates the contents and history of the compost heaps. She points to interesting forms such as a pendulous brugmansia or tree datura, “akin to the jimsonweed of Georgia O’Keeffe,” a cast-stone frog atop a neoclassical column, wrought iron “embracers” (C-shaped brackets on stilts to support tall plants), and spherical cages that create a framework around and through which plants can grow, which become skeletal, sculptural elements in the winter. Seeing the breeze unsettle the enormous leaves of a ‘sum and substance’ hosta, she praises their color, observing that “movement in the garden is a very wonderful thing.”

 

Strolling through the warm, moist environment of a plastic-roofed hoop house, Bockbrader detours from a conversation to transport a plant outside. “Oh, it’s too hot for you in there,” she says to the plant. “You need to be out here in the shade.” Returning to human dialogue, she describes how she uses cuttings to propagate fuchsias and begonias and plants whose names she doesn’t yet know. “It’s a sickness,” she confesses, “just ask my workers.”

 

Gesturing toward the cast-concrete frogs, turtles, and pots, some deeply covered in moss, others just beginning to show signs of it, she explains how the spores on terra cotta and cast concrete migrate from one object to another to create the green, crusty surface. She notes that it was once the norm to treat the terra-cotta pots with bleach to remove this growth, and how she and Norris came to prefer the cultivation of these as living, rather than dead, objects.

 

Upstairs, among the merchandise displays in the store, Bockbrader persistently refines arrangements, grouping and regrouping objects so they don’t look like “a mishmash.”
As she repositions items, she discusses how raising an object above the surface of a table or the floor adds variety and interest to a grouping. Her favorites for that include the wrought iron stands that hold plants, pots, and other objects.

 

The vital consideration in a garden, as in a home, Bockbrader asserts, is “how to move through the space, physically, mentally, and visually. Where are you going to and where are you coming from?”
Planting a garden and styling the showrooms at Campo de’ Fiori are both a matter of training the eye over time. “The thing is to keep looking at things and changing them around,” Bockbrader says. “My philosophy is that all people do in life is move things around—even the most creative people. After all, life is a learning experience.” [SEPTEMBER 2010]

 

Gladys Montgomery is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living and editor of Berkshire Living home+garden.

 

THE GOODS

Campo de’ Fiori
1815 North Main St
Sheffield, Mass.