Day one of the manual works for The Rose Garden began last week. Really this was a day to work out possibilities, and to make a start. We know that as with any project or new body of work, making a start, or the first mark is crucial. It gets the creative juices running, and new ideas start bursting out.
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| Before |
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| The Plan |
The first task was to identify our "wedge-shaped" area, within which we would apply our transformations. We had previously asked the caretaker at Spode to avoid all management and tending of the space, as we wanted to create the maximum visual effect for the viewer to see the distinct area we had chosen for the transformation.
We decided that the wide edge of the wedge would be at the front edge, at the railings, where the public walk past, tapering to a point almost 30 yards away on Spode's outer wall.
Once the area had been defined, we set about identifying what needed to be kept and what should be discarded, and then clearing, weeding, pruning, cutting, scraping and cleaning.
There is a large earthed area running the length of the railed wall of the garden which no doubt used to be full of roses, but today is home to the thistle - lots of thistles and really healthy, sharp thistles at that.
Over by the Spode building, a few large shrubs had to be negotiated, but only the bits that fell within the demarcated zone. One of these shrubs is a rose bush, though it has seen better days. It was slowly being strangled by an enthusiastic deadly nightshade. We gently stripped that away from the rose. and we'll gently prune it at a later date, before fully cutting it back this autumn ready for the next couple of years.
By the end of Day 1 we felt we'd really got somewhere - we could start to see how the final work might look.
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| After i |
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| After ii |
The first task was to identify our "wedge-shaped" area, within which we would apply our transformations. We had previously asked the caretaker at Spode to avoid all management and tending of the space, as we wanted to create the maximum visual effect for the viewer to see the distinct area we had chosen for the transformation.
Over by the Spode building, a few large shrubs had to be negotiated, but only the bits that fell within the demarcated zone. One of these shrubs is a rose bush, though it has seen better days. It was slowly being strangled by an enthusiastic deadly nightshade. We gently stripped that away from the rose. and we'll gently prune it at a later date, before fully cutting it back this autumn ready for the next couple of years.
The main focus of the space is the central circular plantbed, which we will build up before presenting our proposal for 2015 - a beautiful bespoke ceramic replica rose in the form of our new Spode China Rose. More details of this part of the project to come. For now, it was a question of clearing and weeding in readiness for the building works of next week.
1 comment:
Looking good, but how will this fit in with the sale of Kingsways car park and Spode?
Are parts of Spode not for sale, or protected by a masterplan or planning restrictions?
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