Gardening
Garden ornament
Denis Wood
One tends at first to shy away from ornaments through an ins tinctive feeling that a garden should be conceived as an integral whole and stand on its own feet
for better or worse without gratuitous decoration. This same warning was sounded by Gertrude Jekyll and Christopher Hussey in the introduction to their book, Garden Ornament (Country Life 1927): "Garden Ornament is a secondary part of the Art of Gardening. The most pretentious and incompetent attempts at producing a garden generally make exaggerated use of ornamental objects and devices." Nonetheless, in this monumental work (it weighs 281 lb) they discuss in great detail every sort of adjunct and accessory, gates, paving, steps, balustrades, urns, vases and sculptured ornaments, topiary, knots and parterres, loggias, garden houses, orangeries, canals, lakes and water gardens, fountains, bridges, pergolas, treillage, seats, sundials. dove-cotes, overgrowth and Hispano-Moorish gardens.
Of vases and urns and sculpture, the authors wrote, "nowhere . . can sculpture be set to better advantage than in a garden" and continued, "the function of a statue or urn in a garden . . . for, within limits, the two are interchangeable — is twofold: primarily, it is to accentuate a point in a design; subsidiarily, to arouse an emotion proper to any given part." This, is, of course, true but it is surprising that such perspicacious authors overlooked what must surely be the chief value of statues, urns and vases, to provide contrast, that quickening juxtaposition of organic and inanimate.
In the present state of our civilisation and experience it is probable that we should find a garden with no kind of artefact monotonously boring and unconvincing and, on the other hand, it is certain that a mere collection of stone or lead work, however perfect, would appear little better than a monumental mason's yard. It is the conjunction of the two which works the magic.
In the great gardens of Italy and France contrast of this sort is seen as its most effective; herms at the crossings of paths at the Villa Medici, urns and statues at Versailles, beasts at Courances, all these seem to be an integral part of the original design and never to have been added later piecemeal. This is a difficult principle for a gardener today to live up to, best met perhaps by choosing not copies of Florentine boys or of human figures at all, but rather impersonal, anonymous objects. An obelisk or an urn at a focal point in a garden can be a very telling addition. Vases can act as finials on the tops of gate piers, or can be put into niches in walls. In both cases they are best when seen well above eye level, so that they make a contribution to the principle of height. Of all the lesser principles of garden design, the most valuable and least dispensable is contrast, which is exercised in different ways, among them the juxtaposition of height and space, as for example boles of trees seen rising from the ground with ample space around them, uncompromised by shrubs of middle height; in a small way this can be done by putting busts into niches in walls above eye level. I have done this in my own garden, having discovered in the attic of my house on taking it over a number of life-size plaster busts by the previous owner. They were treated against frost, and although of no outstanding value, are interesting and successfully relieve the blankness of brick walls. Once, also, having admired an exhibition of Romano-British art at the Goldsmiths' Hall many years ago, and in particular the Gloucester Head, I had it copied in Clipsham stone — but this was promptly stolen. It is knee-high objects, sundials, even bird-baths, which compromise the integrity of this contrast between height and space, and which are consequently difficult to place without causing a perhaps unrecognised discontent.
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