Garden ornaments, sculptures, pots, all the objects we place in our gardens, can carry into your present garden all kinds of deeply personal meanings, feelings and associations with people, places or past experiences. Too often, objects, garden ornaments and THINGS we put in our gardens are anonymous. We visit an antique shop or a garden center and come home with something that caught our eye: a birdbath, an inscribed terracotta pot or a poem painted onto an antique board.
More often than not, these bought objects have little or no life because they have little or no connection to you, your house or your land and the garden it supports. They are bought things. And when your guests or visitors come to see your garden, no message, no feelings come from these things.
Photo © Joseph Valentine
The photos associated with this entry are of The Green Man, a 5,000 year old Druidic symbol of the meeting place between mankind and the natural world. It’s a classic decorative icon for a garden, in large part because the Druids who created this figure saw it as a symbol for the meeting place between people and plants, between mankind and the vegetable world.
In order to bring this classic garden object to life in our garden, to relate it to us, our land, our garden, we thought about making, not about buying. The idea came to us when I had chain saw in hand. An 18” caliper cherry tree in what is now our outdoor dining area was struggling from too much moisture in this low spot in the ground. Furthermore, its crown was shading the east side of an 80 year old and magnificent maple tree that would shade our new dining area.
I got my chain saw out along with a 12’ ladder and started to cut off the upper limbs. And as I did I realized I could leave at least 8’-10’ of the trunk intact, rooted in the ground. We could then hire our friend Gerry Prozzo, a sculptor, to carve a sculpture in the trunk. Gerry lived nearby, and I was in the midst of designing a garden for he and his wife Cindy Szekeras, a child’s book writer and illustrator.
Gerry came along a few days later to look at the cherry trunk. Mary and I, who had not all that many months ago, been in England, started thinking through what Gerry might carve when Mary remembered the perfect thing: the Green Man. We had seen examples of him high up in the roof bosses of the cathedrals in France we had visited years ago and, more recently, in Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire and later at Tewksbury Abbey.
Gerry knew exactly what we were talking about. Within a month or so, he completed the face of The Green Man, including oak leaves that curled over his forehead and over his ears and onto his cheeks. He also carved a small birds on one side of his head. It was perfect. It brought our friends Gerry’s work into our new garden. It reminded us of our travels in Europe and cathedrals we visited. It transformed a living tree we had to remove into a piece of sculpture.
Photo © Gordon Hayward
We wanted to pay Gerry for his work but he would hear nothing of the sort. We agreed that Mary and I would maintain the new entry garden my crew was installing at their home for one season in return for our Green Man. No money passed between us. That entry garden appeared in 1998 on the cover of my book GARDEN PATHS for the Taylor Weekend Gardening Guide series from Houghton Mifflin, so our friend and garden photographer Jerry Pavia got into the picture as well.
Photo © Joseph Valentine
Years and years passed and the trunk rotted at its base because of that wet ground. I cut the trunk off at just above ground level and placed it next to a Japanese Tree Lilac, on that my mentor, 85 year old Howard Andros had given us just after we moved to our new home. That 1” seedling was now a twenty-five year old tree, so, as you see in the photograph, Gerry’s Green Man leans against Howard’s Tree Lilac. We have lunch most days during the growing season in the area where we display the gray trunked Green Man next to the gray-green, lichen-spotted tree lilac and think of Gerry and Howard and the Druids.