Pride rocks
THE Rockery is the craziest bit of hard landscaping ever made anywhere, I think. It is an heroic piece of landscape creation.’ Tom Stuart-Smith is surveying the water breaking onto the stone 40 feet below Wellington Rock, the largest and most outrageous of Joseph Paxton’s gritstone creations at Chatsworth in Derbyshire.
For much of the end of the 20th and the beginning of this century, Paxton’s alpine masterpiece—constructed in the 1840s in memory of the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s visit to the Alps on his Grand Tour—has been overlooked. Overgrown Victorian yews and rhododendrons added to the fusty impression, which was then compounded by plantings that were intended to bring colour, but ended up creating a disjointed rag bag.
The only people who really seemed to understand the point of the Rockery were the children who clambered over the thrilling boulders and between the giant rock stacks playing games of hide and seek.
