Weeding the Web

Creating an atmosphere with sculpture: Kern Baby by Faye Claridge, Compton Verney

You might disagree, but I think sculpture makes a garden. Of course, it's got to be the right one. No point in something tiny getting lost in a landscape, or something huge overwhelming a corner. Usually I like there to be at least a tenuous link to the setting - no Easter Island heads next to the climbing rose (OK, I admit, I'm guilty of this one, but I was young...)

A recent visit to Compton Verney, though, highlighted garden sculpture from a different angle: the atmosphere it creates. A row of eighteenth-century philosophers are a calm accompaniment to a contemplative walk. Animal sculpture implies a wildlife haven (I hate it when you see something like a bronze stag in the middle of a short-mown lawn). But what does this do?

 

Kern Baby by Faye Claridge is a five-metre high corn dolly. It's inspired by photographs taken by Sir Benjamin Stone who recorded festivals and customs in the UK around the turn of the 20th century:

The original Kern Baby was much smaller, as you can tell by the heads of corn used for the head.

Credit: Sir Benjamin Stone, The Harvest Home Kern Baby of 1901. Whalton Northumberland. (1902) © Benjamin Stone Photographic Collection.

Faye then took the idea of children gathering around a Baal fire (a bonfire lit on St John's Eve)...

Credit: Sir Benjamin Stone, Northumberland Baal Fires St. Johns Eve. The prepared faggots. July 4th 1903. © Benjamin Stone Photographic Collection.

and created an amalgamation of the two:

 Faye Claridge has had photos taken of children around her own Kern Baby which can be seen in Compton Verney's accompanying exhibition.

Credit: Faye Claridge, Digital amalgamation of 2 Benjamin Stone images The Harvest Home Kern Baby of 1901 & The Beltan or Baal Fires of Northumberland 1903)

If you've seen the film, I'm betting you're now thinking of Edward Woodward and The Wicker Man. It's difficult not to.

(If the trailer doesn't play, see it here. If you're looking for a film to watch to mark the passing of the late, great Christopher Lee, this wouldn't be a bad choice.)

Is Kern Baby really threatening, though, or are memories of the film responsible? I couldn't make up my mind. However, it's interesting that Robin Hardy*, director of The Wicker Man, is quoted as saying:

"Everything you see in the film is absolutely authentic. The whole series of ceremonies and details that we show have happened at different times and places in Britain and western Europe...The wicker man itself is quite real...What we hoped would fascinate people is not that they would think these things are still going on in Europe, but that they would recognise an awful lot of these things as sort of little echoes from either out of childhood stories and nursery rhymes or things they do at various times of the year."

Kern Baby certainly changes the scene at Compton Verney.  Here's the view in one direction from near the house:

Very ordered, rational and classical. Here's what you see in the opposite direction:

Do you get a frisson too?

I asked Faye if she herself felt there was a sinister edge. Stone's original Kern Baby image certainly jumped out at her when she saw it but, Faye said, the technical aspects of her production had involved her too much for her to feel anything but familiarity.

Faye Claridge with Kern Baby, Compton Verney

She did, however, take her children, aged three and five, to see it and was completely unprepared for their reaction. It was getting dark and there was a full moon; I think I'd have been spooked too. Faye said, "They didn't like her at all. 'Why doesn't she have a face?' they asked."

Reception-age children, in daylight, had no such qualms. Faye has said: 

"She is a great example of how disguised or 'faceless' figures raise awareness of our most common and unconscious form of interaction and judgement-making and make us question how we relate to others (in the past and present)."

Which, don't you think, sounds rather PC. Questioned further, Faye left socio-political phrases behind. Beyond cultural film references, she said, Kern Baby taps into something far deeper. There's something oddly unsettling about the figure. She's not human, but she's dressed in human clothing. She's called a baby, but obviously isn't. Which all chimes nicely with Robin Hardy's description of ritual above.

For me, she seems all the more sinister for being at odds with the Palladian setting. It is mysticism confronting rationalism. In fact, from certain angles, Kern Baby gives the Palladian mansion the dimensions of a doll's house: paganism seemingly overwhelming rationality.

A giant corn dolly isn't something that most people will want to emulate in their garden, but creating a mood in total contrast to the setting is an intriguing option. Not easy to pull it off but a fascinating dimension with which to play.

Kern Baby will be at Compton Verney until Sunday 13th December, after which she will move to the Library of Birmingham, where related photos are currently on exhibition.

• For more on the film, see The Various Versions of Wicker Man

See more on Compton Verney's past exhibitions:

• Dan Pearson's Arts and Crafts meadow
• Quintessential Englishness: Capability Brown meets Shakespeare

And for the right sculpture in the right place: Placing sculpture in the garden

GBBD: hazy blue with dots of red

This month I'm proudly displaying my newest acquisition - a cerinthe bought at a local plant sale. I've held out against this plant for some time because I tend to avoid annuals when possible. I probably would have left this on the stall, but for the fact that I'd forgotten cerinthe was an annual (it looks perennial, don't you think?) and bought it before I remembered to ask. I just fall for that bluey haze every time.

I have high hopes, though, for self-seeding, as I was assured that it would be with me forever. Already, though, I fear I've put it in the wrong place, as I read that it takes best to poor, dry soil and it's in rather hefty clay.  Next year, if there are seedlings or I remember to save the seeds, I'll try them in the dusty, dry soil of our south-facing front garden. Sarah Raven gives useful information on sowing honeywort, as it's also known (bees love them).

Strangely, considering the number of gardening books I've acquired, I've found it impossible to track down in their pages and have had to resort to Google.  I suspect it's become fashionable.

The red splashes behind? Alpine strawberries. They catch me out frequently, as I wonder what the little red flowers are in the borders and realise they're fruit. I let these plants wander at will and the fruit must ripen almost as you watch as, combing however carefully through a border, I never seem to find the ripe ones all in one go.

You don't exactly get a meal (there are thirty strawberries in my hand above and no, I'm not a giant!). They are rather dry and light when picked. But mash them with sugar before eating to release the juice and you'll know why I let them roam so freely.

This is part of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gardens. Why not pop over and see what else is flowering?

A good weed? Grow a Little Fruit Tree book review

It's not often that a gardening book has me champing at the bit to get out and do something. But after reading the new book by Ann Ralph, Grow a Little Fruit Tree, I was desolate at the thought that I had missed the bare-root planting season.

Ann Ralph is a fruit-tree expert who's spent twenty years in nurseries and teaches pruning in California. What, she asks, is the point of having a large tree that produces so much fruit that much of it plummets to the ground and is wasted? Or why struggle with a tree that is too tall to pick from easily? 

Why, indeed?

Instead, she advocates a series of small trees, pickable from ground level, producing fruit in succession in reasonable quantities as the season progresses.  And so she goes all out to explain, as the subtitle spells out, Simple Pruning Techniques for Small-Space, Easy-Harvest Fruit Trees.  It makes eminent sense and, intending as I have been to have a go at creating my own espaliers, I was hooked by the whole idea.

The book is full of points that I know I'll be quoting to myself when pruning makes me timid.

Fruit trees are healthier and more abundant, not in spite of what we do to them, but because of it.

And, speaking of timidity, here's something to hang on to:

If you don't know what to do, cut some stuff out.

That's what I love about this book; Ann totally understands the paralysis of pruning, when you're standing with secateurs for 20 minutes before putting them back in your pocket and walking away in confusion. She's reassuring about how little damage you can really do. She also knows just how hard it will be when your new trees arrive.  Read the book, though, and you're thoroughly braced for that initial heading cut - at knee height.

Before we look at the reason for such drastic action, what does this book cover? In eleven chapters Ann tells us why we should want small fruit trees; why proper fruit management is good for us, the garden and the trees; why you're better off going for a more vigorous rootstock and relying on pruning, rather than a dwarfing rootstock (which will either give you too big a tree, anyway, or present its own problems).

She covers summer pruning - the key to this method of fruit-tree growing and which is a whole lot easier on a person-height tree. I already summer prune. It's one of my favourite jobs, so I needed no persuading.

She also covers different planting options to bring in the maximum number of varieties. How about planting three trees in one hole and pruning them as if they were one tree?  By the time she's finished with you, you'll be imagining low-branching, head-height trees, beautifully proportioned, brightening your borders in spring and filling the fruit-bowl at a steady pace.

Of course, this isn't a new way of growing fruit - orchards have grown them like this for years - but it's not so often seen in the back garden.

This is a clever book in the way it imparts knowledge. It took a couple of chapters before I suddenly realised that Ann's casual, friendly style had actually handed me a lot of information. Some of it I've never heard before: "Be aware that a fruit tree is still dormant when it's blooming." Some gives you an oh-I-see moment: summer prune too late and a tree will feel it as a winter prune because it's already withdrawing nutrients from the leaves.

The sections that tell you about actual pruning take up only about half the pages. As she says:

This book is not a technical manual - fruit tree management is far less complicated than we have been led to believe.

The pruning chapters cover elementary principles; what to do to shape the tree in the seasons after that initial cut, and four basic pruning rules on keeping a tree as you want it. There's also The Hardest Pruning Cut You'll Ever Have to Make, in which she screws your courage to the sticking place for that knee-high lop which will give you the easy-reach branches and, without which, you'll never have the tree you're aiming for.

Previous chapters cover general points about planting (no soil amendment!) and fruit varieties, and later ones look helpfully at watering (with information useful for all sorts of plants), working with nature to limit pests and diseases (she's a big advocate of promoting health through using worm castings), and when your fruit is actually ripe.

This isn't just about apples and pears. Ann's advice applies to cherries, plums, figs, and some that you're much more likely to find in California: peaches, apricots and persimmons. However, because she deals in principles rather than minute detail, it's a book that's useful everywhere.

The downside? Because it doesn't go in for rigid detail, it can be hard to refind bits that you want to check again. However, (hurrah!) there is an index. 

Espaliers are covered generally, but for total hand-holding you'd probably want to check a more specific tome. Thanks to the wonders of cold storage, I now have a couple of espaliers growing away (more about that soon) and I did want to know exactly when to remove the shoots that have emerged all up the trunks. I suspect, though, if I'd asked Ann herself, she'd have told me it wasn't that critical. In future years, I'll...

...Picture an espalier in your mind and cut off anything that doesn't fit into the picture.

Without doubt, this is a book I'll be coming back to again and again. As it was, when I discovered I wasn't too late for bare-root planting, it fired me with so much enthusiasm that I bought exactly twice as many maiden whips as I actually had space for.

And I'm wondering where I can squeeze in a few more next year.

For more info and pictures, see a Q&A with Ann Ralph And for another review, visit Emma Cooper.

Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph, was supplied by Storey Publishing for independent review. RRP £11.99, ISBN: 978-1-61212-054-6. Available from Hive at £8.85.