Boris Johnson has three lifesize, carved wooden elephants in his garden, given to him by his wife for his 60th birthday. But here’s a warning for them both, for when they return from Sardinia to join their elephants again: garden sculptures are horribly addictive. Once you have one, you want more – and most of the good ones are ridiculously expensive unless, like my husband and me, you improvise.
My husband John, who used to be a fashion designer and manufacturer, has taken to making iron sculptures, although he’s too modest to call himself a sculptor. I draw stuff, he says, and Sked (Malcolm Sked, the local blacksmith) makes them. So far, John has created a huge wrought-iron pagoda with a floral explosion on top and two urns, one containing a giant metal phormium whose rusty leaves glow red in the evening sun and wave in the wind. There’s also a gigantic fantasy plant with spathe-like white flowers and enormous heart-shaped leaves growing out of an old truck wheel embedded in a block of Cotswold stone. This was immortalised on film when we were making Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen. Two weeks later a gale wrenched the 8ft leaves from the wheel and sent them flying across the garden. ‘Ah,’ said John, ‘I meant to concrete them in. Bit of a rush job for the camera.’
Even before John took to DIY art, our garden sculpture collection was impressive.
My Cambodian daughter and I bought a two-ton Buddha in Siem Reap. The Buddha was made by stonemasons who are gradually replacing all the looted sculptures of Angkor Wat. When we first saw the statue, it was unfinished – the Buddha’s face and shoulder exquisitely carved, with the rest of him still to emerge from the stone. It was magical. We offered full price for him as he was, but they wouldn’t hear of anything so sacrilegious. They’d been making statues exactly like this for 500 years. Chastened, we bought the statue anyway and Mrs Johnson will sympathise with the cost of shipping.
My garden also boasts a life cast of an employee of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was made as a figure in the background of a play set in a lunatic asylum. We bought him for £5 from the props department and when we carried him to the carpark, each holding him by an elbow, passers-by smiled sympathetically, thinking we were taking home a drunk, face down, knees bent, feet dragging.
The man was white, and when we sat him in our garden, on top of the compost heap, visitors would take fright, thinking he was a ghost, so I painted him all over with resin and graphite and now he looks like a bronze. A few summers back, birds nested in a hole in his head and, once the chicks had flown, I filled the head with fibreglass foam, which I squirted through the ear-hole. It swelled dramatically and bubbled out through the hole so now he has one cauliflower ear. He still looks great.
I hope one day to have one of Emily Young’s huge female heads with windblown hair, or Sophie Rider’s enormous Lady-Hares, or a water sculpture by William Pye. But until I win the lottery I’m going to have to make do with improvisation.
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