Clifton Olds is no gardener, yet people around the world seek his advice on gardening.
Olds, Professor of Art History Emeritus and the current Interim Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, created the most frequently visited Bowdoin-related Web site and the most complete Web site on Japanese Gardens in the world.
"I've been contacted by people asking, 'How do I keep my Maple tree alive?' and 'How do I build a bridge for my garden?,'" said Olds. "I have to tell them I'm an art historian, not a gardener."
Olds suggested that Bowdoin offer a course on Chinese and Japanese art in 1985 and took it upon himself to research and formulate a curriculum for the class. According to Olds, after a few years of gathering information and slides, he had enough material to begin teaching an Asian Arts course. After one year of teaching the course, Olds knew he needed to travel to Asia to see the pieces himself.
"Most art historians will tell you they want to see the pieces they're teaching about, so I knew I had to take a trip to China and Japan," said Olds. "So I went, and I fell in love with Japan."
In Japan, Olds was particularly fascinated by Japanese gardens, plots of land, carefully placed rocks, trees, water, sand and bushes that are considered fine arts in Japanese culture.
According to Olds, the gardens are often associated solely with Zen Buddhism, but they are not inherently religiously affiliated.
"It's important to take these gardens for what they are?a continuous process that has elements that grow and die and move and change," said Olds. "To the extent that they're always changing, they are Zen-like, but people who think the gardens are all sorts of symbols and mystical Zen stuff are imagining it."
Olds decided to focus the garden portion of his class on Japanese gardens and traveled back and forth to Japan five times, taking pictures of some 35 gardens. He decided the images could be used to bring the Japanese garden experience closer to home for students and connoisseurs.
"There's a real advantage to an Internet site, because you can multiply the images forever," said Olds. "You can't understand what a garden is like on the basis of two photographs, so the site really gives people the opportunity to 'walk through the gardens,' so to speak."
According to the Web site, its purpose is "to provide the visitor with an opportunity to visit each garden, to move through or around it, to experience it through the medium of high-quality color images, and to learn something of its history." The site features a total of 29 gardens with multiple images of each. A subsequent garden map allows users to click to be transported to an image of that place in the garden.
To create and maintain the site, Olds has worked closely with Bowdoin's Information Technology Center, especially with Associate Director of Communications for Production and Multimedia Kevin Travers, who Olds said is responsible for the "really technical stuff" on the site. Olds said he updates the site about once every two months and hopes to make it more interactive in the future.
"We'd love to make the site more interactive, so that students can make their own gardens," said Olds. "We would present the student with a virtual plot of land and present them with elements like rocks and trees and so forth so that they can place these elements on the plot."
Olds said Bowdoin has its very own Japanese Garden, which was conceived and created by Nate Cormier '95 and is located behind the Asian studies house on College Street. Olds said Cormier studied in Japan his junior year and fell in love with Japanese gardens. Cormier returned to Bowdoin and built the garden using rocks, trees and bushes from the Bowdoin campus and Olds' yard.
"[Cormier] knew so much about garden design that he was able to design it himself and did a very good job," said Olds. "He left Bowdoin and went on to study landscape architecture at Harvard and is now a successful landscape architect on the West Coast."
According to Olds, the school has failed to take care of the garden and allowed it to decay in years past. Recently, however, a group of women from Brunswick have made it their project to restore the garden and have brought it almost back to its original state. Olds said these women are one example of the many people around the world who are interested in Japanese gardens.
"There is a huge amount of interest in Japanese gardens throughout the world," said Olds. "These groups will frequent my site to learn about the gardens and they have told me that my site is the most complete source on the subject they've found on the Internet today."
Olds said he hopes to return to Japan soon to continue photographing and acquiring material for the site, though he does not have a lot of time now as current Interim Director of the Art Museum.
"When I have more time, I'll go back," he said. "I'd love to make it back in the spring when the cherry trees are blooming, or this time next year, at the height of Japan's color season."
Olds originally retired from Bowdoin five years ago, after teaching art history 22 years at the College.