Landscaping, Lake and Artworks
The landscape design was by Capability Brown but the garden was redesigned at the time of the palace rebuilding by William Townsend Aiton of Kew Gardens and John Nash. The great manmade lake was completed in 1828 and is supplied with water by the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.
According to Palace tourist guides, the garden is maintained by approximately eight fulltime gardeners, with two or three part-timers. The trees include plane, Indian chestnut, silver maple, and a swamp cypress. In the south-west corner, there is a single surviving mulberry tree from the plantation installed by King James I of England when he unsuccessfully attempted to breed silkworms in the Mulberry Garden on the Buckingham Palace site. (This was not the site of today's garden; it was located closer to Green Park.)
Like the palace, the garden is rich in works of art. One of the most notable is the Waterloo Vase, the great urn commissioned by Napoleon to commemorate his expected victories, which in 1815 was presented unfinished to the Prince Regent. After the King had had the base completed by sculptor Richard Westmacott, intending it to be the focal point of the new Waterloo chamber at Windsor Castle, it was adjudged to be too heavy for any floor (at 15 ft (4.6 m) high and weighing 15 tons). The National Gallery, to whom it was presented, finally returned it in 1906 to the sovereign, Edward VII. King Edward then solved the problem by placing the vase outside in the garden where it now remains.
Also in the garden is a small summerhouse attributed to William Kent (circa 1740), a helicopter launching pad, and a tennis court where Björn Borg, John McEnroe and Steffi Graf have played.
The garden is regularly surveyed for its moths by staff from the Natural History Museum, and occasionally visited by the Queen's Swans.
Read more about this topic: Garden At Buckingham Palace
Famous quotes containing the words lake and/or artworks:
“Like a canoe route across the great lake on whose shore
One is left trapped, grumbling not so much at bad luck as
Because only this one side of experience is ever revealed.
And that meant something.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)