Secrets and benches

You never know what you might find on a park bench...

Benches at Great Dixter

Whispering bench

This bench is in West Fairfield park, Pennsylvania, as part of a monument to the area's Civil War military and naval heroes. "A person sitting at one end of the bench can turn and whisper into the wall behind him. A second person sitting at the opposite end can clearly hear what is being said."

State meetings on benches...

An extract from Trea Martyn's book, Elizabeth in the Garden:

In the late 1580's, Elizabeth commissioned Richard Dixon to carve four six-foot-long seats for the gardens at Greenwich. According to the Office of Works accounts, the seats were 'turned with rails and baluster with a lion and a dragon supporting the queen's badges, with two arches under the seats and two elbows to lean, one carved with pediments crested for the weather carved with teh rose and crown with the Queen's letters, with an ostrich, a tassel and an eagle crowned holding a sceptre crowned.' Numerous new seats were added to the gardens and orchard. There were long seats for the garden, one in a 'jasper colour', which gave the appearance of marble and symbolised chastity. In the orchard, three seats, seven benches and several arbours were repainted in jasper, and a canopy was added to the Queen's seat. Four seats in the orchard were painted the colour of brick, and a 'back board for her Majesty to sit against' was painted in diverse colours and gilded.

Towards the end of the century, Portington, the Master Carpenter, made a 'fair standing seat in the mulberry tree garden and new seat with four pillars under the same tree for her Majesty.' The seat was eight feet long and six feet wide, 'standing upon terms arched and carved.' It was painted 'with ash-colour and jasper like rance [a kind of marble, or a red colour varied with veins and spots of blue and white] in water colour'. The four pillars made a pavilion, built around the mulberry tree. Joiners added six five-foot-long and five-foot-high seats with balusters and 'a carved pediment on top' painted jasper and gilded. In 1600, nineteen seats in the orchard and garden were given a new coat of paint. The following year, one last seat was made for the garden: it had a brick base painted a stone colour and a blue lead-covered roof.

The impression is that Elizabeth built a suite of outdoor meeting rooms in her gardens at Greenwich. We might imagine her conducting state business there, recalling her meetings with Cecil in the garden at Theobalds concerning the war in the Netherlands, during the fateful summer of 1587.

Stirring stuff. I haven't managed to find a photograph of what these benches might have looked like, but here's the Shakespeare garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. However, this is very definitely not a queenly bench:



Better is this one at the Elizabethan gardens also in America.



I don't feel too bad at having to go out of the country to find Elizabethan garden references, because Trea Martyn says she had to also in researching her wonderful book. It makes me wonder if any bench has been listed yet?

ps here's some Jasper for you to see the colour ...

Benches as advertising sites

I suppose it will be coming here soon, but not for a long time, I hope.

Bench cartoon

From The Garden Monkey via the Guardian newspaper.

Glyndebourne benches

A poem by the wonderfully named Everette Maddox:

PARK BENCH POEM

Mind if I put up
a park bench
in your mind?
I mean, if
the mind is a park,
why not have a poem in it?
After all, when
you get through
buying hotdogs &
getting a load
of the swans
you'll want
some place to
sit down. It
ought to be fairly
comfortable by
the time a few
generations of
transient assholes
have worn it
smooth, & the paint
off – though
the original idea
was to advertise
my product: my own
green life, now
flaking into winter.


NB: I hadn't heard of this New Orleans poet before, but this is an account of his funeral:

When the poet Everette Maddox died in New Orleans, in February of 1989, more than four hundred persons showed up for his funeral march. It began on Oak Street, at the Maple Leaf Bar and followed a Dixieland Band to Carrollton Station, where it paused and had drinks before winding back to the funeral services at the Maple Leaf

Beautiful Alpine Benches

(subtitled - how much I *heart* the Dolomites. Is it possible to be homesick for a place you've only visited briefly?)

Book bench

Thanks to roving correspondent, Sylvia Petter for this photograph of the bench in the lobby of the British Library