Cultivating Eden with Artist, Landscape Historian & Garden DesignerRebecca Allan

Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

This last week of April, we enjoy an art of the garden conversation with artist, historian, gardener and environmental advocate Rebecca Allan. Bronx-New York-based, Rebecca is “known for her richly layered and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work investigates watershed environments and landscapes and is inspired by her deep interest in botany and land conservation. In 2018 Rebecca established Painterly Gardens, a firm specializing in sustainable garden design. From January through June of 2023, Rebecca’s solo show, Cultivating Eden is featured at Wave Hill House & Garden. The exhibit presents Rebecca’s recent paintings focused on the labor of gardeners and their spaces. By artistically highlighting working process—both visible and unnoticed—her series praises the devoted care that the gardeners provide on a daily basis. She sees Wave Hill as “a special place where art and horticulture are intertwined. Both practices require tenacity, refined skill and historical curiosity.” As an artist and gardener Rebecca notes that one motivation behind her work is “a desire to nurture the world by envisioning and then enacting spaces where beauty is revealed.”