| This article appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press on Saturday, November 30, 2002. |
Artist’s Pots and Plants a Natural Match
By Kathy Gilbert, Staff Writer
| Potter Mark Issenberg, owner of Lookout Mountain Pottery, .  | RISING FAWN, Ga.- Between art shows, potter Mark Issenberg likes to sculpt with plants.All winter he shares his home with about 200 potted plants, he said, including a gleaming white orchid in the bathroom window. Succulents are his favorites, he said, especially ones with interesting configurations. “I like caudiciform plants,” Mr. Issenberg said. “Those big fat-base things –I just love the shapes. They’re like naturally bonsai-ed trees.” Born in Massachusetts, Mr. Issenberg grew up mostly in Miami. A high school art teacher introduced him to plants. His career as a gardener began with geraniums, he said. In 1968, he took a pottery class from Charles Counts in Rising Fawn. After graduating from college in South Florida, he sailed and worked as a firefighter in Miami for many years. In 1998, he opened Lookout Mountain Pottery on Plum Nelly Road in Rising Fawn. “I just wanted a slower lifestyle,” he said. His kiln disgorges scores of ash-glazed pots. Drizzled in homemade wood-ash mixed with glaze, some of them end up filled with soil-less potting mixture laced with bone meal and chicken grit (fine loose gravel) from the local feed store. Packed in the pots are various twisted and blossoming plants: Adenium obesums (“Desert rose,” an African native), pachy-podiums, a Melocactus from Cuba and an Ariocarpus retusus v. furfuraceus monstrose cactus. “It looks like a brain,” he said of the cactus.An active member of the Tri-County Master Gardeners, Mr. Issenberg is an avid outdoor gardener as well. In summer, tomatoes and “some kind of zucchini” and flowers spring up all around, he said. A rock wall oozes all types of hand-planted succulents. The plant bug seemed to occur in him naturally, he said. Even the work of lugging exotics indoors every winter doesn’t kill his gardening fervor. “Why do I have so many plants indoors?” he said. “Because I’m crazy. I’m totally nuts.” Where do you buy your plants? I grow a lot of them from seed. I trade pottery for seed with people in California. I also get a lot of really cool succulents from a guy named Richard at oldmancactus.com in Soddy Daisy. He’s got cool stuff, totally.” How do you care for your potted plants? “I use Super-Thrive, one drop per gallon. It’s the most wonderful stuff. It makes everything grow. You can get it at Kmart or Wal-Mart. Every time I water, I spray them with a light dose of Super-Thrive — it’s like a hormonal something or other, plus fertilizer — or any of the 20-20-20s, Miracle Gro or Peter’s, whatever’s handy when I go to the store. I spray the orchids daily, and I try to water the succulents once a month during the winter.” |
Staff photos by Jeff Guenther