Runnymede

I am back in London with friends, garden friends who take me nice places. Last visit we went to Runnymede, and I've been meaning to post about it since the China trip, actually, when I saw the rockwork garden floors of the sort that inspired Geoffrey Jellicoe's pathway in which 60,000 granite setts surge like a crowd toward the memorial stone.

Runnymede is, of course, a much wider landscape than the small section devoted to the memory of John F. Kennedy. But the memorial garden has often been in my thoughts as one of the most emotional landscapes I have visited, and not just because of its attachment to a slain American president of whom I have no first-hand memory.

It does its job as a landscape extraordinarily well, leading both foot and eye in a gentle manner that only suggests a response, but elicits a greater one than gardens that are far more imposing in their purpose.

Jellicoe did indeed conceive the memorial as a journey, a procession, a pilgrim's progress, that starts in an unmowed meadow and leads through a stile gate, up a hill under heavy tree cover, to a glade at the top where the white memorial stone floats wraith-like under a single tree, an American scarlet oak that is distinctively different from the many English oaks in the wider park. It turns blood-red in autumn.

From here, Jacob's ladder steps go to the crest of the hill where two platforms (one for a king, one for a queen) look out over the valley that birthed the Magna Carta.

But though the view is lovely this part of the monument (the platforms) is I think less effective, simply because it lacks the bumpy, organic granite setts that provide the essential texture in what is basically a modernist landscape. Jellicoe insisted that the setts be laid in a random, flowing pattern in which each block appears to have an individual character, likening them to people at a football match to help his masons understand what to do. Without them, the memorial would still be a masterful layout of space, but soulless. Power to the people.

Vintage Gardens and Gardeners on Flickr

The study of garden history can be inadvertently elitist, simply because the documentation of gardens of the wealthy is comparatively so extensive. Other than the odd photos or family accounts that make their way into archives, there are few sources for records of the gardens of a more average sort; those by people not wealthy or significant enough to have their gardens documented outside the family.

So the flickr photoset 'Vintage Gardens and Gardeners', administered by lovedaylemon, is an invaluable garden history asset. Period books and magazine show what advice was being given as to garden design, but photos are the essential evidence for how gardens were actually decorated, planted and used.

The photoset is a wonderful record of tools and implements, dress and manner, not just how gardens were planted but how they were used. And the faces, beaming out from their beautiful and personal landscapes, which are clearly treasured, make me teary.

I can't say enough about the value of this archive. If you have family or found photos of vintage gardens and gardeners, I would urge you to post them with this flickr set (include as much information about location and date as you know). Let them become a part of garden history. Garden historians everywhere will thank you!

From the top, an elaborate Victorian parterre in a style often associated with a much grander house than that pictured. Families in what was probably their favorite place in the garden: a woven willow summerhouse in the first photo and a sunny bench in the second.

And finally, a topiaric Adam and Eve...note the apple in Eve's hand and the serpent rearing his ugly head. I wonder if they were inspired by Pope's description?

[all photos from the group admin, lovedaylemon]

Unexpected Garden

Contemporary topiary of the urban guerilla variety by Madrid based artist SpY, via itsnicethat.