With such contrivances, it is not necessarily a case of placing them and leaving them to do their work. I have repeatedly hammered on about the tendency of gardens to grow when you are not looking and undo your work in the process, and this is no less the case with permanent sculptural or living focal points. Of course, the sculptures don't grow, but their surroundings do. That can lead to them losing their sense of purpose.
I have a number of photographs to show in this context over the next couple of days. We had a Long Walk which linked the widest extremities of the garden, which was 200 metres long., This had a sculpture at either end to lead you in whichever direction you were facing, a terminal point to aim for. As you walked between the two, something like ten exit points would reveal themselves at right-angles to the main path, none of which was visible until you reached it. The statue of Diana at one end and the sundial at the other gave you the clue that there was a point to following this path, which then revealed its multiple choices to you as you progressed. A truly fine design feature, using the relatively conventional forms of eighteenth century sculpture.
The statue of Diana was in marble, and I often wondered how she would look if cleaned up and standing proud against the backdrop of the large Irish Yew which highlighted her. It goes without saying that that would never be allowed, because, as with the restoration of buildings, there remains this prevailing assumption that everything looks better with age, and that it shouldn't be made to look new. Pity it doesn't apply to retired Head Gardeners too. Still, it would have been nice to see how she would look, a ghost in purest white, glowing in the dusk.
I came in to work one morning to find her lying in six pieces on the lawn. It was clear that a couple of idiots had tried to steal her, obviously thinking that one of them could crowbar it off its security fixings while the other caught it on the way down. Some feat that would be! They never got away with it, and the piece was subsequently restored and replaced. If you stand lower down on the tennis court, you look up at her from the side, over a steep bank of the common Hypericum calycinum, or Rose of Sharon, which is topped with a golden-leaved box hedge. The effect is so simple, yet unbelievably effective, golden flowers against golden foliage. No pictures in flower, I'm afraid -
From the far distance, she would look like this, enticing you to walk this way -
At the opposite end, the sundial beckons, in a photograph that predates my time there -
As I have already described, I had a few years of labour recovering the vista of Yews before all this worked as it was intended. The placement of the sculptures was perfect, the maintenance of the plants around was not. Nevertheless, the intended effect was splendid -
Today I'm going to keep it brief. Other similar features will still be there for me to describe tomorrow. There will still be stories of how to enhance their effect, and tales of how cleverly they were used in the original design concept, even if they had long since ceased to function as planned. And there will be tales of the sometimes subtle and sometimes drastic invasions required to pull them back into the scheme of the garden once their effect was lost.
Till then!
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