I used to give monthly guided walks around the garden, and this feature came near the end of the route. I would to take visitors round behind the statue, where without pointing it out, I hoped they would take in her 18th century bodily ideal, complete with dimpled buttocks formed from acid rains and encrustations built up over many years. She was Amphitrite, not Aphrodite, the goddess of love, but a bride of Poseidon, but I didn't find that out until a scholar took me to task in a letter for not knowing. I preferred to admit to people that in our inventory of objects, she was one of the few suffering from a typo - she was listed as simply 'Statue of a Numph', an error which seemed singularly appropriate under the circumstances. A plump nymph.
Observed from further back, the care that was needed to frame her by manipulating the plantings can be seen. In front of her was a mature Horse Chestnut tree, which was always problematic. It was characterised by its size and a branch heading northwards over her head which produced a forest of epicormic growth every summer which had to be pruned off in the winter. This used to be done by a couple of old blokes shinning along its length with a hatchet, whacking at it for all they were worth, while hanging for dear life with the other hand. It got easier when we bought the cherry-picker. The other aspect of this was that the branch was very heavy and was in danger of snapping off under its own weight, which would in any case have brought it down over the statue's head to obscure her. For these reasons it had been secured by a steel cable many years before to the main stem of the tree. The overall effect of these contrivances was to produce an arch above the statue which at least looked deliberate. Seen from further back, amongst the hexagons, it looked like this -
This is altogether quite a pleasing effect, with the Numph silhouetted against pale sky. What is not so good, and sadly not altogether as clear as I would like from this illustration, is the other carefully thought-out aspect of the design. That Yew hedge on the left, with its angled cutaway was clearly intended originally to match the angle of the low wall on the opposite side of the steps, now hidden by the Choisyas on the right. The thing about hedges is that they grow, whilst walls do not. By this time, the hedge had risen to a higher level than the steps it was mirroring, and the whole thing was out of balance. If this didn't offend me enough through its lack of symmetry, it dawned on me with forensic application of standing and staring, that the plan had originally been to make the whole scene look as if it was cupped within these two slopes, the built and the grown. I resolved to rectify this once I had worked it out.
The growth can be seen better here, where it is evident that the slope of the hedge has now grown a foot or more above the coping stone it leads down to -
Or perhaps this displays better what I mean?
I am now in a position to reveal what I did about it, and show photographs which better display my meaning. These were taken the year I left, so I never saw how it recovered. Slightly obscured by the urn, but nevertheless visible, you can see here the low walls flanking the steps down from the terrace and those down into the bedding area. These had symmetry, and this should have been matched by the hedge, hence the need to cut the hedge back hard, which has already been done in this photo -
It should now be possible to imagine how that would frame the view better as far as the Numph under her arch -
Unfortunately, imagining is probably the best we can do, as I do not seem to have a view taken which includes the statue at this stage of the developing maintenance of the garden!
The best I can do is this, which doesn't show the hedge, but does show a nice chance grouping of two living sculptures keeping company with our much-maligned lady -
Otherwise, I have only this, but it also doesn't show the cup-shape of the foreground hedge and wall -
I may be a decent gardener, but as a chronicler of our times, I have a lot to learn.
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