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Art in the Garden
Aug. 26th, 2007 01:56 pmCrook Hall is a medieval manor house with later additions. It has a medieval great hall, with gallery, a Jacobean sitting room, with ghost (a White Lady), a Georgian house (about which the publicity material is silent: perhaps that's where the family live?) and gardens which are gradually being reclaimed from the wild by the previous and now the current owners.
It is funded by opening the gardens and part of the house to the public, taking bookings for events and running as many special events as possible. There's an "Apple and Pear Sunday" at the end of the summer, when visitors are invited to pick the fruit (and I'm sorry we will be away for that, as I'm pretty sure I spotted a quince tree), and throughout the summer there is Art in the Garden.
We played truant from work one sunny afternoon last week to explore the gardens: gardens plural, because you move within a comparatively small space from one garden to another, from the open meadow in which a maze has recently been planted to a walled garden, to a cottage garden riotous with colours which frames the house, through the house and into a patch of woodland beyond which a pool dotted with waterlilies is the last survival of the moat...
The garden itself was a pleasant place to spend an afternoon; and the art didn't distract from that pleasure. On the contrary, there was the added fun of a treasure hunt, spotting the wooden toad or the ceramic form lurking in the undergrowth. As is the way with treasure hunts, the thrill of discovery was greater than the value of the treasure discovered: of everything we saw, my favourite was this pair of glass kites caught in the branches of a tree - purely decorative, and entirely effectively so.
It is funded by opening the gardens and part of the house to the public, taking bookings for events and running as many special events as possible. There's an "Apple and Pear Sunday" at the end of the summer, when visitors are invited to pick the fruit (and I'm sorry we will be away for that, as I'm pretty sure I spotted a quince tree), and throughout the summer there is Art in the Garden.
We played truant from work one sunny afternoon last week to explore the gardens: gardens plural, because you move within a comparatively small space from one garden to another, from the open meadow in which a maze has recently been planted to a walled garden, to a cottage garden riotous with colours which frames the house, through the house and into a patch of woodland beyond which a pool dotted with waterlilies is the last survival of the moat...
The garden itself was a pleasant place to spend an afternoon; and the art didn't distract from that pleasure. On the contrary, there was the added fun of a treasure hunt, spotting the wooden toad or the ceramic form lurking in the undergrowth. As is the way with treasure hunts, the thrill of discovery was greater than the value of the treasure discovered: of everything we saw, my favourite was this pair of glass kites caught in the branches of a tree - purely decorative, and entirely effectively so.
