Rosemary Verey OBE and the Frog Fountain at Barnsley House
FROG FOUNTAIN AND STONE SHEEP
Spitting frog fountain
Now, our frog fountain, that was put in as a focal point back in 1972, I think, and it was designed by Simon Verity an English sculpture who now lives in New York. He and his then wife and my David sat one afternoon on the grass near where this was going to be. Simon had some plasticene and patches of paper and sketched out some ideas. And first of all he drew out a fountain that shot into the air rather like the Emperor fountain at Chatsworth.We didnt want that. That would be much too grand. This is a country garden; part formal, part semi-formal, other parts of it are just like a cottage garden. We did not want this huge fountain, so Simon came up with an idea of this bubbling thing - then that was not important enough. It didnt make enough noise.
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Simon came into our life at that moment because my husband David was Chairman of the Gloucestershire Diocese and Advisory Board for the County Churches and Simon was always helping David when he wanted stones for their graves. So he had a lot of flat stones and these workmen and he had these marvellous stones, which are actually called Purbeck; in fact Spangled Purbeck because theyve got all these fossils that really reminded us of sheeps wool. I had got this thing about the Cotswolds and the idea that the traditional economy of the Cotswolds being based on the wool trade, what more appropriate thing to have than Cotswold rams represented on this lovely piece of stone. The lovely thing about it when the water plays onto it, is that it really becomes much deeper colours, in two tones. They sit on a block of Hornton stone, which is meant to have streaks of red in it. These streaks of red are meant to represent the blood of the warriors that fell in the battle of Edgehill during our Civil War.
Simon Veritys stone carving./
That was what Simon did for us, but please remember that I actually dug the hole myself. This was 30 years ago, when I was only 50 and at that moment I had a lovely old man called Fred working for us, who was in his 80s. Fred and I dug the hole, carted the soil and then we got into the back bucket of a farm tractor to go to pick up some nice big flat stones. With these we made a surround for it, but we did get the builder in to actually make it waterproof. It hasnt got a liner in. Its made with breeze blocks, rendered. It has split at times. When we have a dry summer it can subside and so we get cracks. But the builder has given us some jolly good stuff to paint it over with.
There is no natural water in this garden and if you are like us, I do beseech you not to put your pond at the highest point because it is totally unnatural. Water because of gravity moves downhill, and so you are far more likely to get your pond half way down the hill or even at the bottom.. Never put it at the top because not only does it look unnatural but it feels unnatural as well.
So in order to get our Frog fountain we had to dig a trench from the house and lay an electric cable to an electric pump so that we could make the pump work. Luckily, this electric cable, although we did it over 30years ago, we dug our trench very deep, the regulation depth, and hey presto it has never gone wrong. It would be awful if it had. There is no water feed to the pond and so when it gets empty we just top it up with the hose.
Rosemary Verey (Author, Garden Designer And Gardening Guru To Prince Charles) At Her Internationaly Famous Garden At Barnsley House In Gloucestershire Talks to Peter J May About Her Life In Relation To Water Gardens.
Rosemary Verey was a famous British garden designer and writer (born Dec. 21, 1918, Chatham, Kent, England and died May 31, 2001, London, England)