Discover Vintage America —May 2011

Ode to the Garden Urn

Creating a garden is a multi-dimensional task that is as relaxing and as frustrating as the gardener chooses to make it. The indeterminate fortunes of all the seeds and plants that the garden designer attends to are complicated by wind, drought, storm and temperatures not to mention the various varmints of the wild who all seem not to share any of the gardener’s artistic intent.

Growing a garden is not for the easily discouraged.  One year it will be squirrels that dine on your tulip bulbs. Another season it will be cutworms who lop off your young tomato plants at ground level seemingly only for the pleasure of watching them fall to the ground. Yes, everyone who gardens knows for certain that there will be a litany of pests, diseases, acts of nature and accidents by other members of your household that relentlessly confront them each season of the year with sometimes devastating effects.

Why, then, do all gardeners so stubbornly continue down their stoic and mostly optimistic pathways attempting to conjoin nature and beauty? We will likely never know.

This season we began, in earnest, to create a new garden space in the lot behind our old house.  Very few plants had traditionally interrupted the grass on the site.  A previous owner had let an aggressive trumpet vine overtake a very mature cherry tree.  We might’ve saved the tree had we moved more quickly to unburden it from the vine but the promise that the flowering vine held of attracting hummingbirds to our yard made us unable to act decisively to kill the vine and possibly save the tree.  So, between the vine’s weight, some rot in the wood and a strong storm wind, our tree fell to the ground. Suddenly being closer to the branches, we were able to study the tiny, hard green fruit that would not get to ripen.  No pie ever for us from this cherry tree that we only now discovered was producing cherries and somehow that just didn’t matter.  The sapling in the brush near the fence, in fact, appears to be a young cherry, probably from a previous season’s fruit off our dying tree.

Death and romanticism are both very familiar to gardeners, so it’s not surprising at all that it was one of the most romantic of English poets, John Keats (1795-1821), who led us to a better understanding of one of the most artistic of antiques, the classical garden urn.

The Romantics were the first to break with classical design and embrace all the chaos and storm and art of nature and its sensualities, all the while discovering new ways of finding beauty in nature and gardens.  And, it is not the least bit ironic that Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” animates that dialogue between the viewer of art and the art itself is frozen in time on the classical shape of the urn.

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;” he speaks of the tree pictured on the urn.  A tree that will never succumb to vines or disease but rather stay fixed forever in its most beautiful moment of spring.

The urn that Keats turned poetic was already an artistic antique by the time he wrote about it in 1819 and, indeed, part of what the Ode is about was the urn’s destiny to be art, beauty and truth fixed in time.  Perhaps that’s the very definition of an artistic antique.

Urns have always been vases of great significance and importance. The Greeks and Romans used them as funeral vessels. Cremation was the custom of the day and a footed object of beauty was a fitting and functional way to hold the ashes and respect the deceased.  Footed, to elevate the remains from the earthly soil. On top, an inverted bell shape that reaches towards the heavens – a very romantic notion even in a classical age. 

Later, Christians rejected cremation as improper but never really gave up on the beauty and significance of the funeral urn.  Aunt Edna’s ashes might not actually now be in the urn yet it remains a fixture of the familiar early 19th century needlework mourning pictures that were stitched by so many young girls in America. The urn is almost always present (if not the focus) in these silk-stitched “paintings” of mourners at the gravesite usually enveloped in weeping willows. The urn (now sans ashes) is the focal point representing the heavenward course of the deceased in this mourning picture by Miss Abigail Walker on view at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in Pelham Bay Park, N.Y.

Finally, everyone who gardens well must keep a very good compost pile and ought to be very familiar with the Book of Common Prayer’s funeral rite passage of “Earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Words that might have been the catalyst for many choosing to turn something so significant as the cinerary urn into truly artistic garden ornaments by planting them out with nasturtiums, coral bells and ivy.

If you find an artistic and antique garden urn at your local auction, be aggressive with your bidding.  Property owners and gardeners do not give them up easily.  Fortunately, for the contemporary and romantically obsessed gardener, authentic garden urn reproductions abound.

 

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Writer and decoupage artist Durwin Rice lives in Kansas City, MO. For more information go to newdecoupage.blogspot.com, or contact Durwin at designcolumnist@discoverypub.com.