Who thinks twice when we reach for a flowerpot and press it into service in our gardens? It’s just a pot – clay or plastic, ornamental or not. Yet, as an exhibit at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, “A Place to Take Root: The History of Flowerpots and Garden Containers in America,” points out, the Egyptians had flowerpots. So did the Greeks and Romans. King George III of England used 7,000 of them to bring new plant species from America to the royal greenhouses.

Susan Lerner, director of COA’s Blum Gallery, says flowerpots are universal. “Anyone can understand them” she said, “because everyone has experienced pots.”

Lerner is the impetus behind the gallery’s current exhibition, “A Place to Take Root: The History of Flowerpots and Garden Containers in America.” The exhibit is a joint project with the Stonington Connecticut Historical Society, Susan Tamulevich, curator, and with curatorial assistance from Mount Desert Island landscape architect Patrick Chasse.

“Flowerpots are silent soldiers marching through time in service to plants and humanity,” Lerner said.

“A Place to Take Root” more than reflects that sentiment. It delights the eye with more than 50 examples of flowerpots. Highlights of the exhibit – and there are many – include a terracotta pot from Italy decorated with mermaids, heads of fauns and beribboned swags fruit; a 19th century terracotta pot with an all-over impress of seashells, and contemporary monumental cement pots with stonelike surfaces.

In contrast to Tuscan terracotta urns and a Greek amphora in the exhibit are the glazed pots Connecticut potter Guy Wolff reproduced by studying pottery fragments found at Monticello, Mount Vernon and other sites.

Pots from France, England and The Netherlands reflect the history of garden aesthetic as it evolved from ancient to contemporary times.

One facet of the exhibit is devoted to the work of Eric Soderholtz, a Swedish photographer who settled in West Gouldsboro in 1902. Soderholtz had studied ancient art and architecture and wanted to create garden containers that could withstand sub-zero Maine winters. He developed a technique of making pots, which referenced the designs of the classical vessels he had studied in Europe, from concrete.

“His eye was so powerful,” said Lerner. “He was able to translate that into his designs.”

Famed American landscape designer and gardener Beatrix Farrand used Sodorholtz’s vessels in her horticultural center, Reef Point, in Bar Harbor. When that garden was dismantled in 1955, some of the Soderholtz pots found homes at the Asticou Azelea and Thuya gardens on Mount Desert Island.

Rounding out “A Place to Take Root” are the elegantly massive Lunaform pots made by Phid Lawless and Dan Farrenkopf of Sullivan.

“Our work was meant to be the departure element in the show,” Farrenkopf said. Lunaform pots, made of cement reinforced with steel wire, may weigh as much as 1,500 pounds. Their monumental size dwarfs the humble clay flowerpot, but each has its place in the evolution of gardening and garden containers. Most of the other pots in the exhibit, Farrenkopf said, have a “thrown imprint, someone shaped it with his hands.” Lunaform pots are shaped by hand, but also are made on molds, thus giving less evidence that they are handmade.

“All the pots in the exhibit,” said Lerner, “have distinct qualities. They have their own private language, like any other design.”

She said that “A Place to Take Root” has been well-received and has attracted viewers far and wide. “People are so joyful about it.”

It is the third exhibit referencing the work of Beatrix Farrand that Lerner has organized at the gallery.

Guy Wolff reproduction pots are available for sale at the gallery, as is a reproduction of the booklet “Garden Pottery,” written by Eric Sodorholtz.

“From the very dawn of civilization,” Sodorholtz wrote, “when gardens began to receive more than the merest primitive husbandry and … the hand of art began deftly to order and enhance the truant beauties of nature, the most striking feature to be introduced in them to their advantage has been pottery.”

“A Place to Take Root” amply illustrates Sodorholtz’s poetic observation.

“A Place to Take Root: the History of Flowerpots and Garden Containers in America” is open until Sept. 18 at the Blum Gallery, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor. Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. There is no admission charge. To learn more about the exhibit, call the college at 288-5015. Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at 990-8153 and ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.