Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Harry Potter's Garden

Travelling with ten- and seven-year-old boys, you come to see the U.K. as one giant Harry Potter theme park.  In Oxford, you can do a Harry Potter tour of colleges used as film locations.  In Edinburgh, you can sit in the back room of the Elephant Cafe and gaze at the view of Stirling Castle that inspired J.K. Rowling when, as an unemployed single mother, she penned the first two books in the series.  (And of course, you can purchase the indispensable "Birthplace of Harry Potter" muggle...er, mug.)  But our best day of Harry Potter tourism took place at Alnwick Castle, the "Hogwarts" of all eight movies, where Max and Milo took broomstick-flying lessons.

Fortunately for me, Alnwick is the site of what is reputed to be the most ambitious current garden project in Britain.  The castle, built after the Norman Conquest and renovated many times to fit the tastes of different eras, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.  The family is in residence for part of every year, and Alnwick Castle Garden is the project of the current Duchess, Jane.  Many of the gardens I've written about have the goal of historical re-creation, attempting to showcase a classic design from another period.  This garden is decidedly contemporary.  Work did not begin on the garden until 1996.  Since then, Jacques and Peter Wirtz, the stellar Belgian garden design team, have been working with the Duchess to bring her vision of a "garden for gardeners" that is also a "garden for families" to life. 

The first thing you see is a spectacular water feature by William Pye, The Grand Cascade.

The bold linearity of the design is set off by luxurious textures, such as the river rocks at the bottom of the small waterways

that run throughout the garden.  At the top of the Cascade is the Ornamental Garden, where this hard/soft tension is expressed through the contrast between the perfectly-trimmed, sharp-angled box and beech hedges

and the lush shapes and intense colors of the plantings.

Once again I greeted the familiar coneflower (ecinachea), which it turns out is as popular a garden flower in England as in Texas, where we like it because it can tolerate drought and heat.  Apparently it doesn't object to temperate climes and lots of rain either.

This part of the landscape garden is walled, and makes imaginative use of the textural contrasts between stone and shrub.  Often, the relationship is a delightful surprise:  it is the artfully-shaped yew topiary that seems hard while the warm, weathered stone looks soft.

The rectilinear crabapple pergolas shaped the space beautifully,

reminding me of the Donald Judd sculptures in Marfa, Texas.

Alnwick Castle Garden currently consists of ten different features, and I was not able to visit them all, but I could not resist venturing behind the locked gate of the Poison Garden.

In addition to well-known posionous plants such as deadly nightshade and stinging nettle, there were familiar garden plants such as laurel and vinca that I had not realized "can kill."  Opium poppies, cannabis, and even tea had their place, for as our guide (no one is allowed in the poison garden without a guide) reminded us, addictive substances work because they are just a tiny bit toxic.  I'll bet this is where the the students in the Hogwarts Potions class do their fieldwork.

Ignoring the Path of Virtue at Stourhead

Stourhead Park is one of the greatest eigheenth-century English gardens,

designed by the wealthy landowner Henry Hoare ("the Magnificent Hoare," a nickname that gave my students lots of giggles) after his return from the Grand Tour of Europe.  Like so many other Grand Touring aristocrats, he had fallen in love with the landscape paintings of Claude,

Poussin,

and Dughet.

Returning after several years loaded down with precious artifacts, including rare books and paintings, Hoare decided to create an Italian landscape in the English countryside.  Unlike other gentlemen of taste, he did not hire a professional landscape designer but did the work himself.  He had the Elizabethan house pulled down and replaced by a Palladian villa,

and also created, over many years, an exquisite landscape garden on more than two thousand acres.  Stourhead landscape garden is considered, in the "sister arts" tradition of the eighteenth century, to be both "painterly" and "poetic."  It is one of the chief examples of the notion that gardens, paintings and poems are "sisters" among the arts, capable of the highest form of aesthetic expression and thus each possessed in some degree of the qualities of the others.  Henry Hoare's garden, then, not only looks like a Claude painting, it also has a poetic meaning, a narrative that unfolds in time as visitors make their way around the property.  The most famous of the circuit gardens at Stourhead presents the visitor with a choice between the Path of Virtue, which leads up a steep and rocky climb to the Temple of Apollo

where one is rewarded with a spectacular view across the lake to the misty, Claudian horizon, and the Path of Vice, which leads, by a short, easy downhill walk, to the pub. 

I've always loved bringing students to Stourhead and I consider it one of my favorite walks in the world.  But on Monday, I decided that since I know the gardens fairly well, I would concentrate on two things:  looking that the spectacular collections in the house, which I had never visited, and finally getting some time for a little sketching of my own.  It was hard not to feel guilty as I sent the students (and Sam) off up the steep climb while I plopped myself down in front of a hydrangea bush.  But my talentless, completely untrained sketches are a major way that I relax, focus, and really see what's in front of me, and I have been missing the practice.  Besides, Stourhead's hydrangeas were beyond gorgeous that day, whether seen from a distance,

in a medium shot,

close up,

or even in an amateur's notebook.

And that's why the last four photos in this post are the only ones I took myself.