Rhythms Of Nature Orchestrate Design:

Hardcastle’s Walk on the Wild Side By Tovah Martin Nov 29, 2013

If you’re thinking of doing the typical chorus line of poinsettias this holiday season, don’t bother hunting up Pamela Read Hardcastle. If your game plans go along the tried-and-tedious lines of a few token cyclamens placed haphazardly here and there, you might not need to harness the power of Pamela Read Hardcastle.

But maybe you want something different. Maybe you were thinking of trying for a look that is very natural and slightly off beat this year. Maybe you want to take the opportunity to snuggle with the outdoors in the comfort of your own warm little home this holiday season. Then by all means, Pamela Read Hardcastle is your girl.

Pamela Hardcastle has quirk. Not only doesn’t she do ordinary, she isn’t apt to think along any sort of predictable lines. That’s great for an adventuresome clientele. It also works well with Ms. Hardcastle’s ingredients. Go into the woods, slog into the swamps, check the hinterlands and you are apt to find the sorts of off-the-beaten-track fodder that feeds Ms. Hardcastle’s vignettes for clients in the nearby Berkshire region as well as throughout New England.

She is at the mercy of the Great Outdoors rather than wholesale floral suppliers to spark inspiration and provide the fixings. And heaven only knows where that will lead. Nature has a way of reinventing the wheel every day. But Ms. Hardcastle does more than just applaud nature’s delicious inconsistencies. She takes the rhythms of the wild and runs.

For example, this year she is big into hickory bark. Her car is brimming with bark slabs and slivers just waiting to be made into Christmas tree ornaments. If past performances are any indication, they will probably be stationed not far from a variety of twigs with bundles of fern sprigs tied in ribbons tossed in for good measure. Add some antlers, string garlands from wisteria pods, and you have magic a la Pamela Hardcastle.

In way of explanation, Ms. Hardcastle is fond of dismissing her concoctions with a simple enigmatic statement like, “I love ordered insanity.” If that sounds like an oxymoron, you would be right—except that it perfectly describes what Ms. Hardcastle pulls together. It all started with fashion design. “I designed clothes for dancers,” Ms. Hardcastle explains. Among her clients were dancers performing with Jacob’s Pillow, “I specialized in making costumes for women who loved clothes they could move around in.”

So that was how she gained her love and understanding of fabric. “I learned how to hand sew, how to move it and rip it. I worked with light and saw how it plays with fabric.”

But fashion was only one of her outlets. She also loved music—on one hand, she studied opera at The Hartt School in West Hartford and explored early tonal music. On the other extreme, she was in a rock band. Then came the shift. “I had children, and had to change gears.” She explains how horticulture entered into the brew. She was caretaking for the Millay Colony for the Arts bordering the Edna St. Vincent Millay house in Austerlitz, N.Y., with her former husband when she moved to her current home in New Marlborough, Mass. At that point she met the Swiss gardener, Margrit Suter. Not only did she learn more about the nuts and bolts of gardening from Ms. Suter, but she was also introduced to the simple joy of the craft. “Margrit was in her 60s and I was in my 20s and she was singing while wheelbarrowing loads of manure uphill,” Ms. Hardcastle recalls. Her mentor also changed the way Ms. Hardcastle approached design, “She taught me how to look at proportions; she taught me about form and structure.” All those lessons aided Ms. Hardcastle to become a garden designer, but they also translate indoors. “I love designing interiors,” she says, “I love form, I get mesmerized by it.”

Eventually, all this morphed into floral design, a craft that uses all her talents. But don’t think of your typical stiff and stuffy flower arrangements in connection with Ms. Hardcastle and her creations, because what she does is more like an art installation with all outdoors as a collaborator. “If I can make something look unfinished, but be finished—I’m happy,” she sums up her style. Winter gives her a special opportunity to introduce nature into living quarters when people are starved for close encounters of the green kind. And the configurations that she masterminds often reveal aspects of the wild that were previously overlooked. “I like working with nature in its seasons,” she concurs, “I go back to the same space over and over again. There is so much grace out there.” When Pamela Hardcastle works, you see all of her influences converge.

Throughout her home, she incorporates her own personal stash of tactile textiles. And in her floral designs, linens play more than just a cameo role. A piece of velveteen might be wound on the bias into cording to tie around fern fronds. Or homespun might be draped languidly as a nubby table cover. Instead of vessels to hold fruit or ornaments, she might use bark. Branches of all sorts are assigned starring roles. Actually, all of her fetishes enter in, “I have a wild affection for trees,” she says. “I love all their parts; I just like looking at them.”

Over the years, Pamela Hardcastle has pushed herself to continually realign her vision. “For years,” she says, “I didn’t like pink. Then I saw a different relationship—I saw the way forsythia turns from plum to burgundy and the many shades of Japanese maples. But it was the autumn colchicum that really changed my mind.”

That pink-flowering crocus look-alike glitters in autumn. And yellow is next in line for her on-going initiative to blow the cobwebs out of her preconceptions. “I’m reengaging with yellow,” she affirms. Many of Ms. Hardcastle’s clients ask her to transform their homes for the holidays, knowing full well that a new, deeper understanding of their surroundings will result. But you can witness Pamela Read Hardcastle’s journey through the year and share her vision at the Old Inn on the Green in New Marlborough—where her work is constantly part of the ambiance in all its twiggy, seedy, and leafy splendor. One of her favorite installations was a display of paper snowflakes crafted by local children combined with a series of spare wire wreath hoops—without the usual fussy greenery wound in. As she explains, “My heart is really in it when I can work with texture and color and involve the community.”

Anything goes in Pamela Hardcastle’s dialogue. Sometimes she plays with vibrant color, other designs are more hushed. But she always trains the eye to see simplicity anew. “Look at that curved bark,” she enthused, unloading her car from a scavenging hunt of forest detritus, taking out a piece of bark with a particularly poetic flourish in its curves. “Imagine that with nothing more than three orange persimmons…”

countytimes.com