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THEgallery’s employee at Zaplin Lampert on Canyon Road unlocks the gate to the left of the building and precedes me down the stairs. He tells me that beyond a certain line behind the gallery, right where the green grass ends and the yellow dirt begins, is private property — and I am not to go there.

He gestures at the sculpture garden where I’m headed, and then at a casita (also private property) that sits between the grass and dirt.

On Canyon Road, the difference between private property and private property accessible to the public can be hazy. But I am grateful for being allowed to see the four Allan Houser sculptures in the garden by Zaplin. I am here to experience all that free-access sculpture gardens in the Santa Fe-albuquerque-route 14 axis have to offer.

I’m prompted by the outside exhibits at the recently opened Vladem Contemporary, which I visit with Devendra Contractor, the museum’s architect. He says that the museum’s design team wanted to create an art space for all art lovers [see “Space specialists,” September 22, Pasatiempo].

For example, the museum’s central lobby serves as a passageway that connects the Santa Fe Depot with the museum’s main entrance on

Guadalupe; it passes through the building and affords passers-by views of the art inside the ground-level gallery. “In a way, this building is also like a train station,” Contractor says. “It’s a cultural park.”

The outside footpath between the museum and its shop is open around the clock, too. There, people can view Astral Array, a kinetic light sculpture by Albuquerque-born artist Leo Villareal [see “Seeking enlightenment,” September 22, Pasatiempo].

“One of the things we told Leo,” Contractor says, “is that when the train comes, there’ll be this influx of people. And we asked him, ‘Is there a way that your lights can respond to human energy, to all the human activity?’”

Villareal delivered. The light installation reacts to people walking beneath it, and, Contractor adds, forces the audience to wonder how we make sense of the natural world.

This is also the intention of most sculpture gardens: Their art works, placed within a natural habitat, urge the viewer to reflect on their connection to nature. But sculpture gardens do more than that.

Kevin Box, sculptor and co-creator of Origami in the Garden near Madrid, says these spaces where nature mingles with art are based on the idea of accessibility and draw people into the subject matter.

“Outdoor sculptures tend to be the most accessible because you don’t have to go inside a building to see them,” he says. “You don’t have to necessarily go to a museum or a gallery.”

ART IN THE DESERT

Box’s Origami in the Garden sits on 35 acres near Madrid. His artwork is also represented at Kay Contemporary Art in Santa Fe (which, coincidentally, has a sculpture garden of its own) and is on exhibition at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden in Texas.

The sculptures at Origami in the Garden intentionally don’t have price tags. “That’s not what art is about,” Box says. “That’s not what we’re all about. I mean, in a gallery, there’s a price tag. That’s what they’re about. They’re there to sell artwork, and they do it well. But it’s a different audience.”

To create his origami sculptures, Box and his collaborators follow origami principles and use casting and fabrication techniques Box pioneered. Their artwork co-exists outdoors with jackrabbits, coyotes, the odd bobcat, and at least one badger. At the garden’s entrance against a red sandstone cliff stands Hero’s Horse , an 18-foot-tall white Pegasus made of powder-coated fabricated stainless steel. Nearby, blue, white, black, and white origami ponies, made of powder-coated cast aluminum, appear to be running out of the bushes. The ponies were created by Box and Te Jui Fu, a world renown origami artist.

Box is quick to point out the work of other sculptors. He praises the Allan Houser Sculpture Garden, a mere three miles from Origami in the Garden. “It’s beautiful out there,” he says. “Allan’s son, Bob Haozous, is a tremendously talented sculptor, too. I love his work. And I think the new addition to their sculpture garden with his contemporary work is tremendous.”

The Allan Houser Sculpture Garden is dedicated primarily to the work of Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser (Allan Capron Haozous) whose grandfather was Geronimo’s first cousin. Houser began his artistic career as a painter but quickly turned to sculpture, forever transforming Native American art.

Allan Houser’s work is also on display at the Glenn Green Garden Gallery and Sculpture Garden in Tesuque. Glenn Green shows me around the gallery’s circular and smooth sculptures by Khang Pham-new, who shapes the solid granite by hand.

Green’s sculpture garden feels like a park, with well-manicured grass and a river that runs behind the main building. I nod at a woman on a bench a few hundred yards from us and ask Green if Tesuque locals visit the garden. “Oh yeah,” he says. “People bring in their friends all the time. Just spending time. That’s beautiful.”

ART IN THE CITY

See Allan Houser’s work and that of dozens of other local and international artists at the Albuquerque Museum’s extensive sculpture garden, most of it accessible to the public at all hours and for free.

There, I encounter one of the hazards of sculpture gardens in the high desert: As I wander through a living-sculpture garden designed by University of New Mexico students, I step into an ant colony. My feet burn at once, and I jump and dance like Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes in front a massive geometric structure by Mexican artist Sebastián — and in front of the museum’s curator, Josie López, who’s been showing me around. Fire ants sting, even if they’re art.

Sebastián is a Mexican artist who was friends with Houser. His enormous blue sculpture, Variación Nuevo México (1989) — based on principles of the math and science of atomic and molecular structure — emerges from the sand to the left of the museum like a miracle.

In Santa Fe, a good starting point for a sculpture garden tour is the Santa Fe Botanical Garden on Museum Hill. Carole Áine Langrall, director of member and community engagement, shows me Emergence (2013), a three-piece sculpture that artist Candyce Garrett carved from (1989, bronze) by Allan Houser is featured at the Allan Houser Sculpture Garden. Bill Barrett’s Lexeme III

California Academy black granite. It looks like enormous dinosaur eggs. Other animal-form sculptures at the garden peek out from behind trees and bushes.

Just down the hill on the grounds of the New Mexico Capitol, a sculpture garden houses dozens of sculptures. Allan Houser’s Morning Prayer (1987) sits on the East Concourse, near Dan Namingha’s Passage (1998) and near Earth Mother (1992) by Estella Loretto, a Jemez Pueblo artist who studied sculpture under Houser.

Across from the Capitol is another sculpture garden, next to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation on Paseo de Peralta, that not even many locals know is free and open to the public. Foundation president Jamie Clements says that the spot is primarily a garden but grew with the addition of several donated pieces, including a fountain with sculptures by Eugenie Shonnard, who studied in Paris with Auguste Rodin before moving to Santa Fe. Shonnard’s house sits at the heart of the complex.

This garden is yet another example of private land open to everyone — benches abound, as do sculptures. One peeks at me from inside a thick rose bush: a small monolithic sculpture of two lovers by Zimbabwean artist Fabian Madamombe. On the veranda of Shonnard’s house, I marvel at the bat sleeping house Clements assures me the sculptor herself put there.

Back on Canyon Road, I step into the scenic sculpture garden next to Zaplin Lampert Gallery, with its aspens and Mexican feathergrass.

Groups walk by on Canyon Road and pause to look at the Houser sculptures around me. As though I were part of the garden, too, passers-by stop to ask me which one is my favorite — something I doubt would happen inside a museum. My favorite is This Was Our Home (1993), a sculpture of two figures who remind me of a dream I had while visiting Japan: Two tall figures with faces covered by dark clothes.

Sculptor-gardener Kevin Box’s words come back to me to perfectly summarize the moment: “A sculpture garden is not a sterile space. You can talk, you can be as loud as you want as you wander around it. You let your guard down. Sculpture gardens are not intimidating to be in. It’s inspiring to be in nature, and especially when there’s beautiful trees and plants. It disarms people to some degree, and then, when they encounter artwork within that environment, they engage with it more easily.”