While hiking in the Rocky Mountains of Aspen, Colorado, Andrew came across one of the fabled marshmallow box gardens he'd thought was only legend. His phone's battery mysteriously drained, so he decided to draw the field en plein air instead, as proof it existed. He also managed to procure what he believed were marshmallow spores. As an experiment, he planted them in a fallen aspen tree that used to stand next to the volleyball court. By some natural miracle, the spores took aggressively to the wood, and this gorgeous garden bloomed.
The first Marshmallow Box Garden grew out of that same Anderson Ranch residency that produced the Prints. Instead of grouping the boxes into furniture, Andrew planted them directly into the landscape — a field installation where the individually grain-matched boxes, each one sanded and finished by hand, read less like objects and more like a crop, or a colony, taking root in the ground itself.
It's the piece that first suggested the boxes could leave furniture behind entirely and become something closer to sculpture or land art — the beginning of the idea that would return, on a larger scale, at Craft Contemporary and again at the Eliot School.