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20240728 Anglesey Abbey
by Andy Corrigan

Making new friends on a walk around Anglesey Abbey. Looking up, around and on. A visual essay walk.

I was inspired to undertake this walk after reading Rebecca Solnit’s chapter ‘Labyrinths and Cadillacs’ in her book ‘Wanderlust’:

“Many gardens were sculpture gardens, […] whole spaces that could be read, making the garden as much an intellectual space as the library.
[…] in the space and time of the walk and its encounter with the statuary, the story was in a sense retold just by being called to mind.”
(Solnit, 2022, p. 74-75)1

1)

Three summer flowers and a butterfly in the Winter Garden.

Image: A series of nine circular images arranged into three rows and three columns. Three images of individual flowers are repeated in the top and bottom rows, and the middle row images get progressively closer to a butterfly.

Calendula, Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist), California poppy, Peacock butterfly flittering around lavender. A place to sit. Summer in the Winter Garden.

2)

‘Painting’, a-muse on the Emperor’s Walk.

Image: A life-sized lead statue of a female figure on a plinth in front of a tall hedge of Copper beech. She is holding a paint palette in her left hand and a raised paint brush in her right. She is Apollo's muse, Painting.

A-Muse, Female figure with palette by IrisBox on Sketchfab

3)

A stumpy tree standing out in an avenue of more statuesque trees.

Image: A panoramic photo of an avenue of tall trees. A single small tree is indicated in a circle, the remainder of the image lightened

Pl@ntNet App, a citizen science project, identifies the tree as Catalpa bignonioides.

Image: A series of screenshots of a plant identification App, showing the percentage chance of a correct identification increasing.

Catalpa bignonioides - a gnarly portrait.

Image: Nine square images showing different perspectives and parts of the tree arranged together in a square. There are big bright green heart shaped leaves, groups of creamy white flowers with red speckles increasing towards their centres and pollen laden stamen. There is a hole all the way through the main trunk, images of it from each side, together with a close up of the bark, are loosely suggestive of a face.

On 31 May 1874, William Thiselton-Dyer wrote to Charles Darwin to share some observations of the movement of plants. Fellow botanist Thomas Meehan had recently observed movement of the stigma lobes in Catalpa flowers manually stimulated by a syringing technique.

4)

A struggling sycamore(?) tree.

Perhaps a victim of recent climate variations - a long dry summer and a long wet spring?

Image: A struggling tree

5)

Skylight Garden

Image: A view from inside the circle of Oak structures on which people can lean back and look up at the sky, which are surrounded by small trees and shrubs. There are several different cloud types in the sky.

The twelve supports of the Skylight Garden. Image: A cycle of images in a gif showing each of the twelve oak support structures from directly opposite. The effect of the changing images creates a sensation of spinning around.

Looking up, looking around and looking in. Image: A collage of images, a panorama along the bottom edge shows ten of the supports in a line. Above this are seven photographs taken whilst leaning back in different supports and looking up at the sky from different angles, there are all sorts of cloud formations. To either side, there are also two images found through searching for "clouds" in Cambridge Digital Library.

One of the first cloud chamber photographs recorded by Charles Wilson in 1912.

Scroll to image 8 in the sequence of nine. A view from above the clouds at the summit of Mount Emei, Sichuan, on 19 Jan. 1945. A gift to from Tang Yao, Director of the National Forest Products Research Station.

6)

Richard Relhan, a Cambridge apothecary, spent much of his spare time creating topographical artworks of local scenes, including Anglesey Abbey, between 1797-1838.

Image: A painting of Anglesey Abbey by Richard Relhan looks very similar to how it still looks today - a priory converted into a Jacobean style house around 1600.

Even the plants growing up the wall look similar ~200 years later:

Image: A painting of Anglesey Abbey by Richard Relhan looks very similar to how it still looks today - a priory converted into a Jacobean style house around 1600.

  • Anglesey Abbey: 1000611 was also owned by Thomas Hobson, and George Jenyns, father of naturalist Leonard, who was a correspondent with Charles Darwin and brother-in-law to John Stevens Henslow. So there are several relevant nodes of connection.

7)

New roses and old marble in the Rose Garden.

Image: One of the new varieties in the Rose Garden. Each of four flowers in the photo is at a different stage of opening. The colour of the flowers ranges from a soft dark baby pink, through a very pale pink, to a peachy yellow, and in form from a tight rose shape to a loose, many petaled ruffle.

A herm, visually quite similar to the head of roses(?!), the curls of hair and petals - a perfectly sized snail nestles in a nook, pretending to be an earring or a curl of hair.

Image: A marble herm of Zeus, king of the gods, with thick wavy hair and beard wearing a wreath of oak, a live snail nestles in his ear like a piece of jewellery or an earbud perhaps.

A 3D model of Hermes, in old age and as a youth, looking forward and back in time. Borders, roads, travellers, transitions and journeys. Gates, doorways and passages, beginnings and endings, duality.

Hermes/Janus herm by IrisBox on Sketchfab

  • The Rose Garden has recently been extended bringing the number of Rose varieties to 60.
  • Herm
  • ‘Four term busts, at rose garden’ 1127063 - I wonder if “Term” is a spelling mistake for “Herm”?!
  • ‘Hermes Propylaios as a youth and adult’ NT 516671

8)

Leaves and seeds, from a Norway Maple(?), taking a rest in the shade.

Image: Green leaves and seeds, perhaps from a Norway Maple, lie in the grass.

9)

A picture frame, framing a scene.

Image: An empty gilded frame captures the view of Anglesey Abbey and a child running across the lawn. Next to the frame, a board showing a painting of the scene.

  • ‘Anglesey Abbey’, by Leonard Russell Squirrell, 1965, NT 513875.

10)

Another struggling tree, a small oak.

Image: A small oak tree with many bare branches. Those with leaves are a yellowish sap green.

11)

A bloom in the wild … [flower bed].

Image: A series of nine circular images arranged into three rows and three columns. The central image shows a singular vivid pink poppy flower, the petals edged with white. The eight surrounding images show a multitude of summer wildflowers in numerous colours.

  1. Solnit, R. (2022), Wanderlust. London: Granta Books. ↩