Sorry if this is going to sound a bit middle of the road; I mean I don’t suppose Baudelaire spent his Xmas holidays doing this kind of thing, but the old year ended with a walk around the gardens of Hyde Hall in Essex – one of the Royal Horticultural Society properties.
I’m not sure that walking in sculpture gardens is becoming my ‘thing,’ much less a ‘project’ but I do enjoy it, and I seem to have done a surprising amount of it lately.
To be fair there wasn’t a vast amount of sculpture at Hyde Hall but there was this great kinetic piece inspired by sycamore seeds; and no alas I haven’t been able to find out the artist’s name.
I can see why gardeners or garden designers might think it’s a good idea to have sculptures that use botanical imagery, but often it seems to me that there’s enough botanical imagery and indeed botany in a garden, without having to add any manmade extras. In general I’d rather have, say, an Eduardo Paolozzi like this one at Kew.
But Hyde Hall does have some spectacular ‘willow sculptures,’ things I’d never seen before. These were not sculptures OF willow, but sculpture made FROM willow that continues to grow, the branches being bound together to form exotic (and I suppose organic) shapes.
I was also taken by the variety of signs dotted around the garden, many of them related to walking, or at least telling you where you should and shouldn’t walk, some more conventional than others.
The implication seemed to be that walkers just go hog wild when presented with a stretch of grass or a flowerbed.
And I don’t even want to think about what they might do to working bees.
