Campo de Fiori pottery on display at Into The Garden
A very cool dish garden by TJ--Planted in moss-encrusted Campo di Fiori pottery
Plants (Calathea, Anthirium, Pothos 'N Joy and ZZ plant) and the TJ design; as well as a full line of Campo di Fiori moss-encrusted pottery are all available right now at Into The Garden.
At Campo de’ Fiori, organic element and inspirations are eternally appealing
WRITTEN BY GLADYS MONTGOMERY for Berkshire Living Magazine
I WANT NO PART OF TRENDS:
I despise trends. I don’t follow
them in the slightest. I do what I like,” says Robin
Norris, the crusty creative force behind Campo de’ Fiori in
Sheffield, Massachusetts, who has followed the same vision faithfully
since the seventies. His business traces its roots to a shed on
Route 7 near Monument Mountain, from which Norris once sold
organic vegetables, plants, and Mexican pottery. With respect to
the green movement, Norris, who runs the company with his wife,
Barbara Bockbrader, was way ahead of the curve.
The very word style, as it’s tossed around now, “makes Robin,
want to retch,” Bockbrader says. There’s a certain irony in that,
because Campo is now at the forefront of the design trendline. No
sooner is its catalog out than competitors are on planes to China to
knock off its product line. This, too, raises Norris’s hackles.
But while others may pay lip service to going green, Norris and
Bockbrader, a horticulturalist with a degree in agriculture from
Cornell University who creates Campo’s inspiring organic gardens
and demonstrates how to use the products her husband designs,
have talked the talk
and walked the walk for decades. Campo’s taproot
runs very deep.
Like latter-day Baucis and Philemon, reincarnated as linden and
oak, Bockbrader and Norris are assuredly more fi nancially successful
than their mythical antecedents, but just as earthy. They’re also selfeffacing,
style, as it’s tossed around now, “makes Robin
want to retch,” Bockbrader says. There’s a certain irony in that,
because Campo is now at the forefront of the design trendline. No
sooner is its catalog out than competitors are on planes to China to
knock off its product line. This, too, raises Norris’s hackles.
But while others may pay lip service to going green, Norris and
Bockbrader, a horticulturalist with a degree in agriculture from
Cornell University who creates Campo’s inspiring organic gardens
and demonstrates how to use the products her husband designs,
have talked the talk
and walked the walk for decades. Campo’s taproot
runs very deep.
Like latter-day Baucis and Philemon, reincarnated as linden and
oak, Bockbrader and Norris are assuredly more fi nancially successful
than their mythical antecedents, but just as earthy. They’re also selfeffacing,
in a magazine: even their catalogs only show
pictures of their backs. Bockbrader is an unselfconscious
natural beauty, deeply tanned,
wearing no makeup, her hair the soft brown
of an oak leaf in autumn, clad in sandals,
brown socks, a spring-green shirt, and short
khaki cargo skirt, slightly dirty from a morning
of gardening. Norris, his face peppered
with sun freckles and his long, silver hair
bound into a ponytail, wears his jeans like
a second skin.
Norris cultivated his aesthetic sensibility
as a kid growing up after World War II
in Snedens Landing, New York, a Hudson River hamlet inhabited by what he
describes as “an eccentric bunch. The
men built their own houses, some with
thatched roofs. We’d leave doors open,
so you’d go in and have something to
eat, and leave a note.”
His parents’ neighbors were a group
of intellectual, cultured, well-traveled
American aristocrats whose artistic values
favored the classical, the timeless,
and the picturesque. Norris’s father was
vice president of RCA International and,
later, president of the National Foreign
Trade Council. As a boy, Norris spent
six years in Europe, attending school
in Switzerland and England and living
with his expatriate parents in London,
who also had a country home in Kent.
Then the family moved to Rome, into
an old palazzo from which his mother
and their cook would sally forth to the
food and fl ower markets at the Eternal
City’s Campo de’ Fiori piazza. Norris
absorbed English and Continental—
forgive the expression—
style, through
his pores.
Envisioning an eventual position as
a diplomat, he began his career working
on Wall Street. But the Vietnam War
changed his perspective, and he became “a
wandering poet with my three-legged dog,
Magnolia,” he says, laughing. “She’d wag her
little tail in the morning and we’d go that
away. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.”
Norris homesteaded on a Vermont farm
for six years, and in 1983, he underwent a
kidney transplant and settled full-time in
the Berkshires to be nearer to Stockbridge
friends and his Boston doctors. He became
the assistant gardener at Indian Line
Farm, the nation’s first CSA, in Egremont,
Massachusetts, and spent the cold months
visiting Indian tribes in Mexico, using his
1978 Ford pickup (which he still has) to
bring back items to sell.
Bockbrader’s trajectory landed her in the
same place, geographically and philosophically.
She grew up on an Ohio dairy farm
and intended to be a doctor or a philosopher
and live in a big city. She started college
with this plan in mind, but when the career
path didn’t feel right to her she dropped out
to get her bearings and returned to Cornell
to earn a degree in agriculture, focusing on
horticulture and etymology. Visiting her college
boyfriend’s grandmother in Egremont,
she found that she “liked the way it looked
at dusk.” Upon graduating thirty-fi ve years
ago, trusting her instincts, she moved to the
Berkshires, taking on gardening clients, waitressing,
and then supplying cut fl owers to the
Old Mill. Eventually, this grew into a fl oral
design service for the Old Mill, Blantyre,
Aubergine, and wedding clients.
Norris and Bockbrader met in the 1980s
through mutual friends. He asked questions
about horticulture and showed her the terracotta
pots he was importing from Mexico.
Then he left her a phone message asking,
“Do you enjoy theater, and do you have an
evening gown?” In response, she left her own
message: “Yes and no.” Now the couple has
two teenage children, and the conversation
about containers and which plants will do
best in each continues, defining an important
aspect of their creative partnership.
Campo de’ Fiori, Italian for “field of
fl owers,” pays tribute to both Norris’s
appreciation for classical antiquity
and Bockbrader’s passion for horticulture.
“We’re very lucky to live here and do what
we do,” he says.
One contribution the company makes to
its small corner of the planet is its restoration
of topsoil and the organic garden environment
on its four-acre site in Sheffi eld.
There’s also the nature of its products, which
are handmade from iron, bronze, glass, cast
concrete, wood, and clay—all materials that
will decompose when they eventually return
to the earth. Cast-concrete birdhouses, vases,
benches, and wide containers that mimic
the mortars used by Indian tribes in Mexico
for grinding grain by hand appear to have
been fashioned from blocks of old mesquite
wood, but will last longer when exposed to
weather.
The company manufactures near San
Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and also sells
the work of Berkshire craftspeople, such as
woodcrafter Bradley Weatherup and metalworker
Bob Keating. Along the staircase of
the showroom building, black-and-white
photographs of fl owers by Dag Sheer resonate
with the Campo de’ Fiori product line;
on display tables are gardening and art books
focusing on the natural world, among them
a volume about the work of Berkshire-based
painter Walton Ford.
Norris’s designs stem from his lifelong
dedication to ecology. This year, following its
animal forms of previous seasons, Campo’s
new products offer a close-up look at seed
pods, with moss-encrusted flower pots.
(Available ar INTO THE GARDEN, of course))
Bockbrader, her husband says, “is moving all the time. She
doesn’t have an off switch.” This mistress of applied aesthetics,
gardens, merchandising, and garden consulting is the
rarest of combinations: moving and talking all the time, yet completely
grounded and calm—like a human still point from which
things unfold.
Leading a visitor through the gardens, Bockbrader points out
the tall cast-iron stakes imitating garlic scapes, used to elevate a
hose so it doesn’t trample plants while watering;
names various plants, noting which need
to winter in the greenhouse; and enumerates
the contents and history of the compost
heaps. She points to interesting forms such as
a pendulous brugmansia or tree datura, “akin
to the jimsonweed of Georgia O’Keeffe.”
Gladys Montgomery
is a contributing
editor to Berkshire Living and editor of
Berkshire Living home+garden.
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Barbara Bockbrader
Robin Norris
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