And one of how it was before, when you had to approach from close up before getting the benefit of the view -
If you remember, there were Yew trees on either side of this lawn, which had collapsed over the vista, and the strategy I employed to ensure that the view would never be obscured again was to keep them cut back to an intrinsically interesting organic flow.
Other focal points required similar interference, although not necessarily quite as revolutionary as the abstract forms created above.
One of the first we tackled was the view out into the South Park, down the Lime Avenue to the obelisk which stood way out in the field. The Lime Avenue dated back to the 18th century, and was assumed to be along the line of the original drive up to the earlier Tudor house which had once stood on the site, albeit in a slightly different position from the present one. Indeed, when we took up the grass in the Magnolia Garden to lay the bark path, we found a few Tudor bricks, which suggested that the first building was probably in the position of the current orchard, and that a few stray building materials remained from its demolition. A recent archaeological dig should have shed light on this, but I do not know the results.
The idea of the obelisk, I think, was to lead people out of the garden so they would then on their return look back at the house where it rose proudly at the top of the hill. The obelisk, however, had long since disappeared into the shade of the trees, and the lead-in to it had narrowed down through neglect within the garden and a lack of pruning on the Lime trees, which needed to be branched up to open the view.
As can be seen from the above photo, the thin structure didn't present itself obviously even when the trees were in early leaf, and it needed reduction and raising of the crowns to achieve this. The reward for going down there, though, was the fine views back up to the mansion, which otherwise were unavailable to the garden visitor, as the garden itself was, at 12 acres, relatively compact around the building.
Here the banks of Cotoneaster horizontalis at the centre left of the picture are visible, the ones that once were higher than the hedge behind, remember? The garden folly known as the Temple can also be seen. It was on this that we unsuccessfully modelled our Entrance Kiosk, a photograph of which I have now managed to find, so I will include it here. Look at the two of them side by side. Or one after the other -
Oh well.
The other aspect of the integration of the obelisk into the scheme of the garden was that we needed to do work on the shrub borders that led down to the start of the Lime Avenue as well, because these had become seriously overgrown too, and were leaning over the vista created by the path that started at the temple. I have already shown you this work when discussing the general pruning principles applied to the mixed shrub borders, so I will only place here a single reminder of the finished effect. Hope you see what I am on about -
In 1993, I obviously got fired up by this part of the design, and took a sequence of pictures showing it off. Bear with me while I indulge myself with three views from the far end back to the garden. First another view back to the house -
This shows the Cotoneaster banks newly-pruned to ground level, and the relatively incomplete look of the climbers on the house, which I would augment with quite a number of new plantings over the years, as well as encouraging the pre-existing ones to reach parapet height. The Temple looked like this from the south, while the smoke-bush flowered away happily, softening the view nicely -
As for the obelisk itself, close-up it looked like this -
Not all that many visitors bothered to go that far beyond the garden boundaries, but a surprising number of those who did would come back and complain to me that there was no kind of inscription on it, as if somehow they expected someone to have parked a War Memorial in the middle of a cattle field with no path leading to it. They looked at me quizzically when I pointed out to them that it was there to lead you to it so you could then enjoy the view back. Most of them hadn't really spotted that, their experience being clouded by their own misapprehensions.
Tomorrow there will be further examples of similar use and maintenance of eyecatchers in other parts of the garden, some of which were particularly effective where the plants were pruned in harmony with the sculptures. Meantime, I will leave you to ponder over the influences of the 18th century landscape garden movement on all this. We will come to that soon.
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