MARQUETRY, LACQUERWARE AND EGGSHELL INLAY MADE IN CAMBODIA
The gardens of the 18th century offer a grown-up alternative to Valentine’s Day, says Tim Richardson
“Furniture, panelling, and elegantly shaped bowls and dishes, created by a group of artisans in Siem Reap led by French artisan Eric Stocker (stocker-studio.com). For the inlay, they painstakingly crush chicken and duck shells, and apply layer upon layer to mango wood with tweezers. The lacquerware is made with natural lacquer from the sap of Asian lacquer trees, each piece dried and sanded seven times for the deep lustre of the ancient masters, while the straw marquetry uses rye straw from Burgundy.”
Marquetry console, £3,600
Light pollution is one of the simplest environmental hazards to deal with – turn off your lights. However, that is easier said than done, and, in most cases, not realistic. Rather, campaigners focus on responsible lighting.
“The fundamental thing is having shielded light, making sure any light source is pointing downwards, where it needs to be used,” says Kathryn Beardmore. The colour of the light used is important, too: “Three thousand kelvins or less is a warm white, which is better, as opposed to a cool white which is 4,000k or higher.” In domestic settings, look for lighting of 500 lumens or less. For Ruskin Hartley, even city dwellers should think about making small changes. “Some of them are simple: draw the blinds at night, so there’s less light going outside. If you have lights outside, remember to turn them off when you go to bed. Put them on motion sensors.”
A small lifestyle change might not seem worth it, but every little helps. Switching off the light will save money and energy.
To view the International Dark-Sky Association’s home lighting assessment, visit darksky.org
In the immortal words of Bananarama, “I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, at your desire”. The Roman goddess of love ought to be irresistible, but she gets short shrift at this time of year, pushed aside by weedy St Valentine. The 18th-century English landscape garden pushes back against the coy Victorian sentimentality of Valentine’s Day, for in it we can find a celebration of a rather different concept of love – earthier, more sensual, perhaps a little more grown-up.
Think of all those summer houses, temples, huts and hermitages dotted about places such as Stowe and Stourhead.
Perfect hideaways for clandestine trysts or tea parties where tea is not necessarily top of the agenda, well away from the prying eyes and ears of servants. Some of these buildings, like the great domed pavilion at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, even contain private rooms accessed via secret doors, apparently designed for such clandestine encounters. Venus herself is, of course, the obvious candidate for use as a symbol of the unearthly power of love, and she crops up in various gardens.
Rousham, in Oxfordshire, has a Vale of Venus: a series of cascades and fountains presided over by statues of the goddess. At Castle Howard, in North Yorkshire, the Temple of Venus was a simple open rotunda – columns supporting a dome – containing a statue of Venus. It was situated at the edge of a woodland, which doubled as a “Garden of Rustic Delights and Erotic Love”. Here, visitors came across a clearing adorned by a statue of a satyr and a nymph in intimate conversation.
Garden buildings, or follies, are fragile things, and the temples of Venus at both Castle Howard and that other great North Yorkshire landscape garden, Studley Royal, have disappeared. Another, at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire, was made
into a boathouse. But there are a couple of stupendous examples that do survive. One is at West Wycombe Park, not far from Hartwell. This was the home of Sir Francis Dashwood, convener of the Hellfire Club. The form of the temple he designed – a domed rotunda on top of a hollow mound with an oval entrance – is generally taken to be a reference to female anatomy.
Moving swiftly on, the Temple of Venus at Stowe, also in Buckinghamshire, is a magnificently elegant neoclassical structure, with a pair of open arcades leading to flanking pavilions. Perhaps just as well for the National
Trust, which now looks after the garden, the explicit erotic murals adorning the interior were whitewashed over in the 19th century, and the “pleasuring sophas” removed. But the statue busts that still stand in niches around the porch represent a quartet of classical figures who were hardly celebrated for their chastity: Nero, Vespasian, Cleopatra and Faustina. An inscribed frieze inside states (in Latin): “Let him love, who never loved before; let him who always lov’d, now love the more.”
If all this seems a tad laddish, it might be remembered that female garden makers also looked to Venus as a symbolic theme. Lady Luxborough, who in the 1740s created a garden at Barrells in Warwickshire, had a shrine to Venus that took the form of a grotto decorated with shells and quartz.
Her particular gardening friend in the county, William Shenstone of The Leasowes, made a Venus shrubbery close to his house.
Their touching correspondence indicates that Lady Luxborough and Shenstone were not romantically involved. Their relationship was based on something potentially more enduring than anything Venus can provide: friendship.