Natural Arrangements -- Ex-Florist Gerd Verschoor Creates Art That's Decidedly Down To Earth

The woman doesn't hesitate as she threads through the 16 upturned tomato cages on her way from the sidewalk into the Seattle Garden Center at Pike Place Market.

She seems not to notice the man in the patchwork vest, black patent shoes and unusual haircut hovering around the cages, tenderly sliding cone-shaped sleeves of brown kraft paper over the wire frames, making them look like a subdivision of tepees for leprechauns.

"You've just walked through my performance," he tells her. She looks startled, but he grins. The grin and the close-cropped hair that comes to a neat point in the center of his forehead make him resemble an adult-size member of Spanky and our Gang.

He's used to the confusion, and he doesn't hold it against people. It happens all the time to Gerd Verschoor, a former florist who is fast becoming a hot and controversial name in avant-garde design. Some people simply cannot see that what he is doing is art. They think it's a display of merchandise. Or, when he does it at chic restaurants in New York, they sometimes mistake it for a pile of odds and ends waiting to be taken to the dumpster.

So he doesn't mind explaining, as he did one day last week to lots of people who stopped to look at his art-in-progress and the finished work set up in the garden store, which had rolled up its big double doors on Pike Place to give Verschoor room to move.

The installation will remain up through this weekend.

As he stuck Idaho potatoes on upturned tomato cages - potatoes are among his favorite objets d'design; he says they are the essence of the earth and are too perfect to be designed by a designer - a passer-by asked if he was making big hats.

"No," he said. "I'm elevating potatoes to different levels."

"For what reason?"

"Because I love the potato."

A man in an army officer's uniform pauses. "It's art, right? I knew that."

With two potatoes securely skewed on each cage, Verschoor, who has by now attracted about a dozen onlookers, begins arranging potatoes in a footlocker-size box of potting soil resting on a hand cart in front of the tomato cages. He plunges wood stakes about the size you'd need to steady a big dahlia into the soil with the potatoes.

A man walks by mumbling about "steak and potatoes."

Another spies the chalkboard in front of the garden store promoting Verschoor's just-published book, "Beyond Flowers, Collecting & Arranging Natural Objects" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang Inc., $55). It is filled with photos of installations in his home and out of doors. The photos show sculptures, or centerpieces, or maybe they should be called simply arrangements, of such objects as sheaths of wheat, buckets of shells, cabbages and rusted furniture frames. The book sums up his philosophy of recycling common and discarded objects to create art. It also is something of a how-to manual for designers and others in the business of creating eye-catching centerpieces.

At a performance/installation the day before in a Berkeley, Calif., garden shop, he used a dead bird he found on the street as part of a piece about the cycle of life. At the chic Le Madre restaurant in Manhattan, where he has been installing sculptures weekly for three years, he recently piled 777 pizzas on top of one another to create two columns stretching nearly to the ceiling.

"Oh, I get it," says the young man studying the tomato cages and the chalkboard. "Beyond flowers, that's very unique. I'll try it at my next dinner party."

Verschoor is amused, flattered even. He doesn't mind people trying to copy for their dinner parties his mounds of potatoes and potting soil, his tumbleweed arrangements, or his dried artichoke-and-bird-nest arrangements. His mission, he says, is to get people to think differently about everyday objects and about what makes art.

Though he says he loves flowers, he has no living plants in his SoHo studio, and these days he rarely uses flowers in his arrangements. When he does, he carefully places them in the installation like individual jewels.

"What is art and what is decor?" he mused earlier in the day as he chatted over a cappuccino before foraging through the market for the building blocks he would need for his afternoon installation. "To me it doesn't matter. I don't know when something is suddenly art. People see what I do with potatoes and dirt and things like that and they think it's odd. But for me, what is important is to get people to think."

Trained as a florist in his native Netherlands, Verschoor in the '70s tired of traditional flower arranging even though he had won elite competitions that made him his nation's champion in that field - no small honor among a people so passionate about flowers that even the most modest homes and taverns usually boast lush flower arrangements.

In the tiny shop Verschoor ran outside Amsterdam, the seeds were planted for his blossoming interest in art and design. Every other week he painted the shop a different color and sold only flowers and plants that matched the shop during that two-week period.

"If the shop was green that week, I would sell only foliage. I would have an opening each time, like a restaurant, and serve wine. I had clients who came an hour and half from Amsterdam. My friend helped me paint it at night, and though I never made any money, we had fun. At the time, it was very revolutionary."

Then Verschoor became interested in questions bigger than how to arrange carnations and roses. In 1988 he moved to New York and began using the streets of Manhattan as a giant supply room. After being invited to display his work at Barneys New York, the trendy store known for its unconventional window display, he landed a permanent job at Le Madre. Since then he has done performances in the windows of Barneys in which he crushed carnations under his feet; created an installation at the San Diego Art Museum; published a book; and been asked by Disney World in Orlando, Fla., to do an installation there in September. He says Idaho potato growers have contacted him about becoming part of their marketing campaign.

In the planning stages is a project to build a hat for the Statue of Liberty festooned with 200,000 blue carnations - he admits this will take some politicking to get permission from the authorities - and a project to put a giant frame around Pyramid Lake in Nevada. The internationally famous artist Christo - who has wrapped Florida islands in pink cellophane and erected giant umbrellas in Japanese rice paddies - is coming to his house for dinner soon, Verschoor says, to give him tips about how to do landscape-size projects.

He says there is special symbolism in the Statue of Liberty project.

"I will call it the re-incarnation of the carnation. Everybody hates blue-dyed carnations, but it is not the fault of the carnation. We have done that to these flowers, we have made them ugly.

"Really, I don't understand why people cut flowers. They say they love flowers, but do they love flowers? Sometimes in my performances I eat flowers, or destroy them and people are shocked. But I say, `This is a mirror. This is what you do when you cut it.' A flower does its best to grow and then we cut it and cut off its life."

People are equally `shocked,' he says, when he lays one exquisite flower, without an accompanying vase of water, on a table as part of an installation. "They think I should put it in water, to make it last. But why? I have no problem to do something that won't last because it is so wonderful to create it. I also don't think that art has to last. That's not what makes art art."

After the cappuccino, Verschoor thoughtfully explores the market's stalls. His modus operandi on this book tour is to arrive at his installation location a few hours early without any particular plan and allow his creative juices to flow.

He looks longingly at the asparagus and notes that at $1.50 for two bunches, it is much cheaper than in New York. He remarks that morel mushrooms "are great stuffed with potatoes." He is astounded to see strawberries at $2 a pint. "They'd be four dollars at Dean & DeLuca," one of New York's trendiest food boutiques.

But two hours later, after time spent alone with his sketch pad, it seems that the only produce he will use from the market is a box of potatoes. He unearthed the tomato cages, kraft paper sleeves and box of dirt from the back rooms of the garden shop.

Just as the installation is finished, the cart holding the box of dirt, stakes and potatoes tips over into the street. People rush to help him clean it up. He shovels the dirt back in the box and lays the potatoes and stakes on the dirt like fallen soldiers laid to rest. He takes the mishap philosophically.

"Well, maybe it will be a funeral for the potato. I can't redo it or it won't be the same. I just have to accept that it happened."

Meanwhile, passers-by are still stopping to talk. The 16 5-foot-tall tomato cages now are in symmetrical rows of four by four, each cage covered with two kraft-bag sleeves and topped by two potatoes. Wooden stakes lay around the perimeter like a frame. The tipped box of dirt and potatoes sits in front with the shovel turned face down in mourning on the sidewalk.

Verschoor is pleased.

"People see this and all of a sudden they ask what it is. They see these cages all the time in their gardens, but turned upside down they don't know what they are. They have to think about it. This gives me a very good feeling to make people aware."