Paula Hayes warns visitors to her studio in upstate New York not to walk under her neighbor’s black walnut tree: The nuts drop without warning, and they are big. Please also be careful of the poison ivy in the back garden, Paula advises. And maybe keep your distance from the bees buzzing around the black-eyed Susans. “I don’t know what your tolerance is,” she says.

Paula, 60, is an artist who uses nature as a material. She is best known for blending succulents, ferns, orchids, creeping figs, and semiprecious stones and crystals in bubble-like glass terrariums, or embedding plants in puckered rubber containers that look like colorful Chinese soup dumplings. She also designs gardens for wealthy patrons and major commercial clients and institutions, including the W Hotel in Miami, the Lever House in New York, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she is the first landscape-artist-in-residence.

But nature, for Paula, isn’t docile. It is self-willed and unpredictable. It blows in, like the redbud seeds that take root in her garden—and may one day take over, if she lets them. The real subject of her artistry is nurturing over time, or time itself.

“What I really, really, really deeply desire is to tell people, let’s just let it grow, and then I’ll work with you,” she says about her landscapes for private clients.

Most weekends, Paula and her husband, Teo Camporeale, an animator and musician, shuttle north from their home base in downtown Brooklyn to a 1780s clapboard house they bought in 2013 in the tiny Hudson River town of Athens. Next-door is Paula’s art/yoga studio, an 1860s building that they acquired shortly after.

Touring this cedar-clad Italianate charmer can last 10 minutes or 10 hours, depending on how long one lingers over the architecture, furnishings, graphic works, sculptures, and, of course, growing things.

Paula worked with engineer John Steele and builder Peter Galante to gut the building and raise the sloping roof in the back, increasing the usable space. Under her direction, a portion of the second floor was cut away to let light pour down to the first. A railing was installed at the edge of the truncated level, creating a catwalk bounded on the other side by bookshelves.

The main level has a pine plywood floor, which Paula specified down to the nail pattern. A niche off to the side is where she works at her computer on project renderings. (Tacked up near the desk is a photo of the living wall she designed for the restaurants that replaced the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building.) There’s a bathroom and a makeshift kitchenette with a four-burner stove and a rear glass wall looking out to the garden, with its laissez-faire tumble of rudbeckia, asters, native holly, and joe-pye weed.

The single upstairs room has hemlock floorboards and ceiling beams, as well as vintage chairs stripped of upholstery and draped in sheepskin. A cluster of brass candlesticks supports knobby stalks of beeswax. A handmade Japanese futon is furled on the floor, awaiting guests.

Most delightful are the many domestic objects that Paula has made herself. Molded silicone pendant lamps alluding to morning glories hang from the ceiling. Dried thistles fill a vase that is nothing more than a painted paper cone.

“You can look at it as everything is ugly or look at it as everything is perfectly beautiful—it’s not medium,” Paula says. She’s referring to the insulation bricks that were extracted during the renovation and are now piled in a mound out back, but also possibly to the world. The bricks will remain as a pedestal for one of her garden gnomes—sculptures molded in clay and cast in aluminum that evoke kitschy lawn figurines as well as the roofs of Balinese pagodas. “It’s in process,” she says.

That goes for the building, too. Paula has mapped out how it will one day be converted into a three-bedroom home for her children and grandchildren.

Shop the Look

In the short term, she and Teo are looking to relocate to Athens full-time. Paula has her eye on a vacant property in the commercial district, where she imagines opening some kind of store.

The move from the city would be “totally counterintuitive,” she admits, because it would take her from the economic heart of the art world. But in other ways it makes sense to reside near the natural world that is her muse. “No more trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” she says.

Appears In

At Her Hudson Valley Studio, Paula Hayes Explores the Intersection of Art and Nature