Artists Lucianne and Joe Carmichael don't call their 7.7 acres of forest in Lower Coast Algiers a garden. But in the larger sense, it is, because they have carefully nurtured, shaped and planted - sometimes with good results, sometimes with results that they would warn others against.

The Carmichaels have owned the land across the road from the levee since 1969, while they were courting. They somehow scraped together a down payment when they saw a "for sale" sign where they had often picnicked and walked in the woods.

They had no idea then how this spot on the Mississippi River would change their lives.

Today it is not only their home, but also, since June 2002, A Studio In The Woods, a nonprofit artists' retreat, possibly the only one in the Deep South. Its mission is to honor both the artist and the natural environment, offering a peaceful and protected place where artists, students and thinkers can reconnect with the beauty and rhythms of nature.

Lucianne knew this mission was being fulfilled when she attended a jazz church service right before Mardi Gras and heard clarinetist Michael White play one of the compositions he wrote at A Studio In The Woods.

"For the first time, I was really seeing the mission enacted, coming to life," she said. "I've never had such an emotional, deep experience. I realized all the work Joe and I have done over the years to get to this point was worth it, if just that one piece could come of it.

"When humans can have reconnection and time with their art that's peaceful, great things can happen."

"It just opened up something that hadn't been there before," White, who is also a jazz historian, told The Times-Picayune during his two-month stay at the retreat as composer-in-residence. "It puts you not only in front of yourself, but in front of nature."

FORMER SUGAR CANE FIELD

That particular piece of nature is a forest turning back into itself. Probably in the early 1800s, Lucianne said, the virgin forest was clear-cut to make it part of a sugar cane plantation, and around 1920, it was allowed to go fallow. The Carmichaels know this because, she said, "An old man passing by one day stopped to talk to Joe. He said when he was a little boy, around the end of World War I, he had the job of keeping flies off the donkey that ran the machine that pumped water over the levee, back here to the fields. Shortly after that, he remembers, the plantation was let go fallow."

Now, the palmetto, water oaks, Shumard oaks, live oaks and sweet gums are what the forest is trying to return to, she said. Naturalist Bill Fontenot, also a family friend, told the Carmichaels that the sweet gums are one sign that the forest is getting close, maybe 50 to 75 years, to returning to its primary stage. "We've helped it for 35 years that may be significant years," Lucianne said.

Fontenot also taught them that the short-lived hackberries, considered "trash trees," decay on the forest floor and return to the soil certain nutrients and chemicals required by live oaks.

"The live oak doesn't come naturally to the forest until the soil is ready for it," Lucianne said. "That hackberry is a vital part of the process. People who just cut down the hackberries don't understand that nature has this plan."

The bottomland hardwoods are also an outdoor art gallery, starting at the gates to the property, which were a gift from metal artist Karen Rossi to the Artists' Foundation Collection, which consists of donated gifts from artist friends. From its inception, A Studio In The Woods has been an artist' community, with workshops, classes and shows of the Carmichaels' and others' works. But the Carmichaels had the vision of the retreat.

In 2000 and 2003, with money from grants, they held symposiums with planners, naturalists, architects and environmentalists to create the refuge and their master plan. They do such things as construct buildings only in areas that have already been disturbed, to avoid taking out more trees; they raise buildings and walkways off the ground, to avoid compacting soil.

PLANS FOR MORE CABINS

The studio has one full-time paid staff member, Ama Rogan, and one artist-in-residence at a time. The Carmichaels have forged long-term relationships with Tulane University, which uses the studio as an outdoor classroom for architecture students, and with the New Orleans Alternative School, whose students visit weekly.

In the future, the master plan calls for three small treehouse-like cabins to be built to accommodate more than one resident artist at a time. In addition to composer White, five other artists have had formal residencies here, from visual artists to writers.

Lucianne is a noted potter, and her work is among dozens of pieces displayed outdoors at the studio. One of her works near the pond is the "Angel of the Smoky Mountains," holding a crescent moon in one hand and a rabbit in her other arm. From a fallen pecan tree, wood and metal worker Joe made the bench in the gallery and the stairs in the studio. The couple collaborated to create the metal birds by the pond.

A face by artist Larry Neville sits on a stump and is framed by the pond. A folly, a gazebo shaped from copper pipe, is a memorial to its creator, William Smith.

"He was working on it when he came to an art show here years ago with some of his friends and he said, 'This is the place my gazebo should go,'" Lucianne remembered. "Tragically, in an accident in his studio, he died about a week later. We got a call from his friends who said, 'We want to finish it,' and could they bring it out here for him."

Art is also part of the house itself. Tiles that Lucianne created years ago, documenting plant after plant, frame one of the windows. The kitchen has a custom light fixture running the length of the room, vines lifting pierced metal blossoms with bulbs inside which the Carmichaels designed and a blacksmith friend created.

The Carmichaels collected recycled wood for years before using it to build their home, which blends effortlessly into the woodland setting. Resident artists stay in a back bedroom with its own bath, which has walls covered with what must be one of the most gorgeous works in tile in a Louisiana bathroom.

It is a "scene we live with every day - it's such a privilege," Lucianne said. Watery shades of lavender, blue and green depict egrets amid leaves of native pecan, palmetto, privet, shield fern and wild grape, all done in a resist technique that used actual plants (and paper cutouts of the egrets) laid directly on the tiles.

The big studio was built to incorporate a gift of 24 old French doors. Behind it is a gallery space and deck that zigzag around trees, overlooking the pond. The pond was originally a low spot on the property. Here, Joe said, he learned to use a backhoe and a bulldozer.

LANDSCAPING CHALLENGES

The Chinese privet near the edge of the pond is what Lucianne calls "one of my largest mistakes," because of its invasive nature. The couple is also trying to eliminate the rice paper plants, which get huge, and have escaped their cultivated spots and spread into the forest.

Two cypress trees, part of the original landscaping around the pond, have never done too well. Lucianne said her analysis is that they are too high on the elevated bank, too far from easy access to the water table.

But in the fern garden area, a rough-leaf dogwood has planted itself. The copper-color Louisiana iris thrive, transplanted years ago from a remote spot to the low place near the house. Grape vein lianas an inch thick lace themselves up to the treetops high overhead. Sooner or later, all the artists explore into the woods, Lucianne said, some more than others. And, sooner or later, visitors contemplate the mystery tree, thought to be a rare obtusa oak, Quercus obtusa. Its defining characteristic: It drops all its leaves in one day, and two days later, it has new little leaves all over it.

"Even if it's not some exotic rare species, just look at that magnificent root system," Lucianne said. She marvels at the dance of the branches in a breeze high overhead. She has written, "Here, there is no hierarchy of beings or artforms. The brilliant spiderweb illumined with dew is treated with the same respect as the potter's vessel or the composer's melody."

The music Michael White created at A Studio In The Woods will be part of his Jazzfest appearance this year, and he will play it at a free public concert titled "Original Jazz Out of the Woods," on May 23 at 4 p.m. in front of the Algiers Courthouse.

The song that so moved Lucianne is called "Dancing in the Sky," also the title of White's Basin Street Records CD, out next week, containing 10 of the two dozen original pieces he composed at the studio.

Her revelation at the jazz church service, she said, "was a validation of this idea that great art can come from truly deep, profound experiences, if you can get in a place where that can happen. By definition, it doesn't have to be here, but there has to be that seminal kind of experience for an artist.

"That song is indescribably beautiful," she said. "I can't wait for other people to be able to hear it."

(Homes & Gardens writer Judy Walker can be reached at (504) 826-3485 or at jwalker@timespicayune.com).

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