Her garden, her art, in a creative symbiosis

Syd Carpenter recently discovered "some amazing, wonderful news. Granny was a gardener!"

Before you nod off, know that this revelation delighted Carpenter, a ceramic artist in West Mount Airy, because she's a gardener, too - quite an amazing and wonderful one, though not a food-grower like Granny.

Actually, Granny had a fabulous name - Indiana Hutson, and, according to Carpenter's Aunt Mary, a prodigious gift: She was a minor celebrity in 1940s Pittsburgh, all because of her Victory Garden.

It was said to be one of the largest in the city, along Fifth Avenue, a big draw for gawkers, who marveled at its size and heft, but also this: All seven of Hutson's children worked the rows of vegetables, which were so plentiful, they fed the family for an entire decade, with enough left over to sell.

Carpenter's garden, up the street from Weavers Way Co-op, is not about physical sustenance. It's an expression of her artistic soul, a flourish of color, light and energy, movement, form and texture, perpetually changing and, like her sculpture, open to spontaneous interpretation by whoever happens upon it.

"It's right out there, engaging the community," she says.

Sure enough, neighbor Kay Wood, also an artist but not a gardener, ambled by the other day and was immediately engaged. "Syd's garden is delightful," she said. "It's always different, changing colors. There's always something to look at."

While it cannot be said that Carpenter's art and garden are one, they are, as she suggests, interdependent. Each is essential to the other, linked in deep and mysterious, sometimes tangible and obvious, ways.

Explains Carpenter, a studio art professor at Swarthmore College who has been represented by the Sande Webster Gallery at 20th and Walnut Streets since 1981: "The garden itself is my art. The forms and processes are shared, and without the garden, my sculpture would not reflect . . . as much insight as it does now. It's a back-and-forth for me, and it's difficult to separate the two."

That delicate interplay underscored "Garden as Muse," a recent show at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Ark., which included several Carpenter pieces that were inspired by a 1992 book she discovered a few years ago - African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (University of Tennessee Press).