I guess I’ll never be an artistic person. I have little patience with the abstract and simply can’t understand anything that doesn’t look like something.

This may be true of most men who grew up on a farm. There were just so many old pieces of equipment and unusual things lying around when we were kids, that we suspect everything has a purpose – if we can only find out what it is.

So, I look at a metal sculpture and instead of seeing the broad, sweeping curves and graceful symmetry, I see the sharp edges and comment, “I’ll bet that thing came off an old corn-chopper.”
It’s just that sort of attitude that causes problems when artists are commissioned to design pieces for public buildings on college campuses. What might have been an artistic triumph if placed in the College of Art looks like the rear end of a manure spreader, when you put it near the Dairy Science building.

That’s just what happened at Washington State University back in the 1970s. The university had a huge metal sculpture placed next to the Animal Science building, and once the shock subsided, everyone began to guess what it was.

Each time I visited that campus, I would look at this monstrosity and try to make something out of it. The piece had several sections of 12- to 15-foot lengths, and each was suspended at various angles to the ground.

After the sculpture was in place for a few months, the head of the animal science department became so curious that he offered a six-pack of beer for the person who could come up with the best name for it. The winner was a professor who dubbed the piece “Hog Troughs in a Hurricane.”

And he was right! That’s exactly what it looked like.

Probably the most intriguing art pieces for me are the natural arrangements of dried plants and flowers. Each time I look at a dried arrangement, I find myself identifying the plants it contains … and pretty soon I’m calculating the nutritive value of this mixture if fed to a sheep.

The first dried arrangement my wife put together was a beautiful combination of curly dock and timothy, arranged in a big moonshine jug. While these plants were attractive enough, I have seen too many of them encased in baling wire to understand why you would put them in a jug.

These bouquets always remind me of that wet spot in the hay field, where the weeds were so bad we didn’t even bother to cut it. To this day, I have trouble walking past a dried arrangement without giving it a kick to see if a quail might fly out.

Such decorations have become big business, however, and there are farms with whole fields planted specifically for this market. They tell me the main concern in growing decorative plants is not climate or soil fertility: The biggest problem is keeping an eye on Grandpa to be sure he  doesn’t spray the weeds before you can get them off to market.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.