Where does your green thumb go in the winter? If you’re Diane Salavracos, it goes straight to the nozzle of a spray paint can. Salavracos, 44, holds a buttoned-down job with the European Union in Brussels, managing EU-Japan industrial relations. For years she found creative escape writing novels and movie scenarios, but eventually painting replaced writing.
Photograph by Diane Salavracos
Then one day her painting got loose in the garden. “The absurd idea occurred to me to create a garden which would be flowering all the year,” Salavracos says. “A garden of all colors, even in winter!” Inspired by a box of spray paints abandoned by a former tenant, she set to work in a corner of the garden at her Waterloo home. Nine months later, her masterpiece had bloomed to “200 square meters of Alice in Wonderland garden.”
Unimpressed with paint colors available at craft and home improvement stores, Salavracos shopped alongside urban taggers at the local graffiti art store (yes, they have those in Belgium), ultimately dropping €750 on spray paints and cement.
Other materials come from nature: dried flowers, storm-broken branches, Halloween pumpkins, pine cones. With these, she arranges her “magic, fairy-like” garden of impossibly vibrant colors, harmonized according to her own taste and symbology. Red is for passion and violence; purple for spirit; orange, her favorite, for joy, fire, and appetite.
It’s delicate work, but Salavracos finds it extremely satisfying. She cites the examples of her parents, both of them doctors: her mother loved to garden, and her father quit medicine to become a fulltime painter.
“Passion and patience are both most necessary,” she muses, “yet sometimes form a strange couple.”
—Keith Hammond
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