The long front view at Saling Hall
We’ve just been doing a spot of picture hanging. Rehanging, rather, to welcome a new painting. In the bedrooms, up the stairs. And suddenly I am seeing them afresh, the way we did six years ago when we moved here. Inertia saps the senses. Pass something several times a day and it ceases to register.
Gardens of course are not pictures; they are processes. The seasons take care of that – and so do the times of day. I have always tried to imprint something permanently satisfying on our main views: structure and proportion in harmony that always looks right summer and winter (and morning and evening.) The main plan is always to concentrate on the longest view available – right to the
boundary and preferably beyond. Our Saling Hall garden was long enough (though relatively narrow) to allow a 150-yard view in the front over the duck pond and along a poplar alley. More park, I admit, than garden. Toward the far end I put a Chilstone Pope’s Urn. Alexander Pope wrote the wittiest couplets in the language. He also commissioned William Kent to design the most perfect urn, with spiral grooves that give something lively to its surface in all lights.
Behind the house, where we planted a sort of landscape arboretum with watery distractions, the central, longest view was even longer, nearly 200 yards to the inevitable eye-catcher, a Haddonstone temple, which we dedicated to Bacchus. The pediment bears two gambolling carp and an inscription that perplexes everyone. Can you figure out “Innumerae Veniunt Artes“?
Now, with a garden a mere 55 feet long, the principles are the same: a central view to the boundary. Not quite central, in this case, because the greenhouse takes up half the width. Trees (or now shrubs) pace out the distance, one third of them evergreens. Their differences of height colour, density and bulk are the sub-plots that keep it interesting. At the same time, with the seasons and the times of day shadows keep shifting and emphasis changing. All this is the framework for a changing scene of leaves and flowers. Movable pots are the sideshows to attract attention to different corners. Two changes of level with stone steps certainly help; the far end is six feet higher, which somehow flatters the modest length of the garden. But the principle is the same, town or country: keep the centre open.
