The Homestead in Humboldt: An Unknown Art

First: The Natural World

The Back to the Land movement in the late sixties and early seventies was a whole culture in itself. Many Humboldt old timers laugh (and rightly so) at the shanties put up by the foolish newcomers. But the greenhorns had a great deal in common with the old pioneers who first settled here. Many were hard working families determined to create a home amongst hostile natives. Some of the resulting homesteads are works of arts. With the help of family and neighbors, my father-in-law created one of the most beautiful small farms I’ve ever seen. His vision is of every day objects being art and art being everyday.

Every beautiful home starts with a beautiful landscape and my father-in-law choose well.

Then he carefully added lovely and useful ponds where they would be filled by natural springs.

The Pond

Each detail, from the sunburst window in the loft above the adobe brick house to the carefully twined grapes curling up the vineyard posts seemed designed both for beauty and for function.

Welcome to the Homestead

He crafts gates with the passion and pleasure usually reserved for high art–searching the woods for the right branches, the right trees–always seeking simplicity even in complexity.

The Chicken Yard Gate

He often repeats a pattern–not from lack of imagination but for the same reason a painter might echo lines in the same creation.

The Orchard Gate

Even the tools he uses daily are placed so perfectly that they seem like great art. Yet they are practical and necessary.

The Tools

Like every homestead, it isn’t perfection but perfection in progress. There are projects waiting to be completed. Areas that need work but somehow even they seem like art in the harmony of the whole.

The Ubiquitous Old Truck in Every Homestead

But above everything else, even the carefully wrought details, is the huge vision. Other homesteads have beauty, have well maintained craftmanship but this place has Art in the grand scale– a round cob guest house that could grace Natural Home, a front door that could have been crafted for a castle, a ladder to a loft that looks like sunshine from heaven, and a wooden bathtub made from local cedar surrounded by nasturtiums. But the best is this exquisite round greenhouse that rises in crystal beauty amongst the orchards and vineyards of the homestead.

The Greenhouse

There are more artists in Humboldt County per capita then any other California county and that is not counting the wonderful artists who create the backwoods beauty that is rarely seen in galleries or museums. These artists are known to only a few.

Now I’m sharing one of them with you. Welcome….

The Greenhouse Entrance

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For more on this beautiful place, look here and here.