The Art of Plants with Barbara Kaytes

Plants emerged from the same primeval nucleic soup to clamber onto a steamy shore as the rest of us, a few, like the algae that leave a velvet fuzz on boat bottoms, or Florida’s flowering turtle grass, retreating back into the sea.

Amazingly adaptive and tenacious, plants have been able to colonize the most distant lands, even regions inhospitable to life—from fiery-hot deserts to polar ice caps; from the highest mountains down into the oceans; and even in the abandoned Ukrainian city of Pripyat 40 years after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, where poplars sprout on roofs, birch trees root on balconies, and asphalt is split open by shrubs demanding light and air.

Often second string to animal investigations, plants may be even more sensitive than other creatures to the world around them. Time-lapse videos show that they perceive their own environment, moving, perhaps at a slower pace, stretching out to touch one another, and turning into the sun. Social organisms, plants are also sophisticated communicators. Phytosemiotics, the field of plant meaning, suggests that plants communicate environmental changes to one another using sound waves that cannot be heard by the human ear, chemical pathways, electrical signaling, soil microbes, and root networks through an intricate subterranean system.

Plants have many more ways to regenerate than other life forms. They might do it through pollination; by releasing spores that can be transported by the wind, as occurs with Florida’s asparagus fern; or by dropping seeds, as the wisteria does with the sudden burst of a pod.

Hitchhiker seeds attach themselves to the fur of animals in transit, while seeds are also dispersed by birds. Ants are another medium of plant dispersal. At least 225 genera of plants are dependent on ants for their propagation. Water is also a great conveyor. The seed of the coconut palm—the coconut, so iconic to Florida yet believed to have originated in South America—can remain vital in sea water for at least four months, the time it might take to drift north to the Florida peninsula.

Plants also propagate by making themselves attractive. They beg to be cultivated. The use of plants as ornaments might have begun with the early Egyptians, who decorated their precincts with rows of sycamores and pomegranates, or the series of terraces of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Across time and continents, different cultures embraced different kinds of gardens—the Islamic garden with water and aromatic plants intended for reflection, for example, and the symmetrical formal French garden, like that of Versailles, which imposes order on nature.

Florida is famed for its hospitality to plants; hence, there are several notable botanical gardens in the state. Among them are Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, named after plant explorer David Fairchild; the more rustic Flamingo Gardens in the mitigated wetlands of Davie; and, here in Vero Beach, McKee Botanical Garden, an 18-acre landscape of lush jungle with 10,000 species of plants and trees, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Plants and art seem to go together, like the blue glass herons by American artist Dale Chihuly, standing in the lily pond at Fairchild, or the giant Lego brick sculptures by Sean Kenney, installed in January at McKee. This past March, the Vero Beach Museum of Art held its 15th annual Art in Bloom luncheon, which featured 12 pieces of art from a current exhibit and the museum’s permanent collection to be interpreted by 16 floral designers.

One of the floral stylists was Barbara Kaytes, a Vero Beach resident who was working on the piece she would exhibit when I went to visit her in January. The artifacts for Kaytes’ display were assembled in her well-lit family room on an enormous granite-and-steel work table that doubles as a dining table. Palm tree boots shaped like Roman cuirasses; stained ebony; a red flower with the yellow stamen of an anthurium to reflect her interpretation of a photograph of a woman’s face on aluminum, a work titled Iman, by American photographer Robert Farber, known for his work with fashion.

The table was equipped with all sorts of supplies: a pair of tiny scissors; a magnifying glass; a box of nail polish to lend glaze and luminescence; a color wheel with primary, secondary, and tertiary colors; three types of lacquer; and, to hold pieces in place while glue or paint is applied, a clamp with malleable arms that end in pincers.

Like most artists, Kaytes works on several projects at a time, waiting for applications to dry or for the spirit to move her, sometimes designing for hours at a time. For a recent exhibition in Tampa, a floral art show sponsored by Creative Floral Arrangers of the Americas, Kaytes created an arrangement of opened tulips on a bed of excelsior.

At the time of this writing, she is assembling the parts of a fantasy bird not seen in nature for a flower show in Houston, Texas. It is a magical bird with delicate yellow-painted feet fashioned from the tiny twigs of Myrcianthes fragrans, an aromatic shrub native to Florida, also known as Simpson’s stopper. The bird’s lacquered feathers are from the climbing fig; its wings from Baptisia, a hardy perennial with pea-like flowers; its tail from Banksia; its body milkweed; its crown echinacea seeds.

Kaytes is guided by philosophical and mathematical principles such as the formula of 3-5-8, at the heart of the Fibonacci principle of harmony, achieved through three main flowers, five stems of greenery, and eight filler flowers. Most of her work reflects her signature style, that of no container; the organic artifacts she assembles stand alone.

She takes me to see her storage cabinet, housed in her garage. On the way we step through her kitchen garden, an intimate landscape of plants native to Florida, with a small winding path and a flock of half-hidden sheep, munching on mint parsley and mulberry bushes.

Against the back wall of the garage are the cabinets designed to hold supplies like chicken wire; a bag of soft, raw cotton; dried seed pods; old vases; and finds such as a shiny length of copper. She selects a vase and a bag, telling me she intends to put the vase in the bag and break it, employing principles of kintsugi, the Japanese art form of the repair of broken pottery, usually with urushi lacquer dusted with gold, silver, or platinum. Kintsugi, Kaytes says, teaches that the breakage and repair are part of an object’s history rather than something to disguise.

Kaytes is also a certified instructor in Sogetsu ikebana, having studied for 15 years the modern Japanese school of floral art that emphasizes freedom of expression through the use of three elements. “I have gone down an Asian wormhole,” she says, referring to her philosophy of arrangement, which started 25 years ago when she traded traditional Western floral arrangement for one inspired by the Japanese.

Kaytes’ collected oeuvre is startling in its originality and sweep, especially against her background, which includes a lifetime of seemingly unrelated experiences: doing her homework in the car while her landscape-architect mother supervised the execution of her designs; studying archaeology for a year at the University of Nairobi; welding metal sculptures; scouting for the fashion industry; representing jewelry and accessory designers; designing jewelry herself; getting married; having two children, a girl and a boy responsible for today’s five grandchildren; joining a garden club.

A reader of nonfiction, more frequently biographies like that of Diane Arbus or Margaret Bourke-White, Kaytes describes herself as constantly learning. “The world is my classroom,” she says. That being the case, this modest neighbor, whom I first met at our dog park, has been well taught.