Excerpt
Defining Garden Ornament
Graceful figures sculpted from marble or sumptuous urns carved from sturdy Portland stone have played a vital part in the history of garden ornament and readily spring to mind when the topic of garden ornament arises. But these formal garden works of art are far from ornament's incarnation.
Ornament can be as simple as a terra-cotta pot, velvety with moss or marbled with a crust of salts, or as plain as a ceramic basin filled with water for the birds. A handful of shells, carried home from the beach and scattered in a flower bed, is ornament. So is a Victorian-era gazing globe, an old livestock-watering trough, a bamboo tepee smothered in scarlet runner beans, and a scruffy scarecrow standing guard in the corn patch.
Garden ornament also may find form as a ceramic plaque mounted on a garden wall or fence, as a tiled fountain in a sunny courtyard, as a planter box painted with bold stripes of blue and white, or as a battered wooden wheelbarrow spilling a profusion of plants. You, the gardener, determine what is ornament and what is not; there are no absolutes, no rules that say you must choose the conventional over the quirky, or follow your neighbor's lead. Your garden is your own, and like your home, you may furnish it as you please.
The effective use of garden ornament, however, depends on more than whim and fancy. The same ornament that spoils one garden, dominating it like a bully or jarring it like a wrong note, may be just the spark that sets another garden ablaze. What distinguishes the two objects is their context: how each relates to the world around it.
Excerpted from Garden Ornament (Smith and Hawken). Copyright (c) 1998. Reprinted with permission by Workman Publishing.