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Every time I walk past the 75-year-old birdbath in our garden here in southern Vermont, I recall when I first saw that cast-stone ornament as a boy in my late grandmother’s garden near Oyster Bay, Long Island. It sat in the center of a boxwood-edged rose garden that was crisscrossed with crushed-oyster-shell paths. While visitors to our garden don’t know what associations I hold with that birdbath (above left), they can tell that it’s old, that it anchors the broad curve of a hosta bed, and that birds do surely visit it. Objects such as this, rife with history and meaning, make our garden feel personal, anchored, and peaceful.
While design elements and plant choices contribute to making a garden feel comfortable and coherent, the restrained use of ornaments and furniture plays an equally important role in creating inviting and distinctive areas within that garden. At the same time, carefully chosen objects underpin the many moods and feelings of different parts of a garden to create spaces in which family and guests will want to linger.
Our old birdbath reminds me of my childhood, and an English staddle stone in our garden (above right) reminds my wife, Mary, of hers. She grew up on a farm in the north Cotswold hills of England where, until the mid-1950s, her father and brother used a circle of 16 such stones, shaped like 32-inch-high mushrooms, with boards stretched across their tops, to support drying sheaves of wheat or barley. When a friend, Theodora Berg, gave Mary the 100-year-old English staddle stone several years ago, Mary momentarily lost her composure at the sight of this reminder of her childhood. A few days later, we set it at the beginning of a stepping-stone path that leads into our spring garden. Being an agricultural artifact, it fits appropriately into our rural setting and now draws visitors across the lawn to the path.
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(This article by Gordon Hayward appeared in the January - February 2003 issue of Fine Gardening Magazine. All rights reserved. pdf
