Where can you…
… clamber over a Charles Jencks land sculpture
…go down an amethyst mine
…see gigantic orchids
…find out roughly how many kilometres it is to Jupiter
…AND have an ice cream
… even if you can’t swim in this colourful pool
all within the grounds of a 17thc mansion?
As usual the photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged.
The answer is in a garden I went to on a recent trip to Scotland. Except it’s more than just a garden – it’s a contemporary sculpture park set over 120 acres of meadow and woodland with some indoor gallery spaces as well. Ten miles out of Edinburgh, in the middle of rolling open countryside, is Bonnington House, home to Jupiter Artland opened in 2009 by art collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson. They wanted to share their own collection of art with a wider audience and from small beginnings it has grown to house over 30 permanent site-specific sculptures as well as a seasonal programme of exhibitions and events. 
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect as “sculpture gardens” can mean different things to different people and, as Richard Jackson wrote on his Garden Visitor blog, “so often wealthy galleries and private collectors buy trophy artworks and then look around for somewhere to put them.” That can be a bit of an anti-climax. However, here it’s the other way round, with artists commissioned to create something for specific sites, so although some pieces didn’t appeal to me in the slightest there was always a clear link between the art and its setting whether landscape, woodland or “proper”garden.
Bonnington House was originally built around 1622, but was doubled in size a hundred later. There are no known images of the house that early but the estate does appear on the military survey of Scotland organised by William Roy between 1747-55, which was commissioned after the authorities realised their campaign to suppress the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 had been seriously hampered by the lack of adequate maps. Roy’s work was later to lead to the establishment of the Ordnance Survey. As you can see the survey reveals an extensive formal landscape with a strong central axis through woodland, and surrounded by agricultural land.
In 1858 Bonnington was given a “Jacobethan” makeover and got some decorative turrets and stone mouldings, based on Linlithgow Palace. Many changes in ownership since then has also meant that large swathes of land have been sold at various points, drastically reducing the estate in size.
the new gallery wing
More recently the house has been modernised and two new wings added. They blend in perfectly, gaining the support of gained the support of both the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland and the Scottish Garden History Society for complementing the original house, and creating new picturesque views without impacting on the designed landscape.
One of these wings houses a small gallery, but apart from the service court – the Steadings – which are home to a cafe and small exhibition space, the house is not open although it can glimpsed through the trees.
The Charles Jencks land sculpture is bottom left, the car park top right. Note the strong axial symmetry of the site is being maintained by new planting
Although the park sits in open countryside not far away is the post-industrial landscape of West Lothian and unfortunately these days the site is being slowly encroached by Edinburgh overspill with another huge housing development planned to be within view of the parkland itself.
So lets take a look round [although you’ll be pleased to know i’m not going to describe or comment on every piece!]
The entrance to the site is very low key, and passes through woodland before emerging into the open, and curving through an enormous land sculpture by Charles Jencks, the American architectural theorist, landscape architect and designer. “Cells of Life” is made up of eight curved and steeply terraced earth mounds, and a connecting causeway which surround four lakes in which land and sky are mirrored, upside down.The landforms are immaculately clipped and maintained, with spiralling narrow paths that tempt even oldies like me to climb up to the ridges and look down on the water below.
It was the first piece to be commissioned and took 6 years to complete, perhaps not surprisng given the amount of earth moving that took place and the fact that it covers 5 acres.
Running between two of the landforms is a rill. It flows from an apple or heart-shaped fountain on a column and runs down to the water’s edge where the more adventurous can leap out onto stepping stones.
I doubt anyone enjoying the space realises that Jencks’s design was inspired, as so many of his works, by natural forms and processes: in this case mitosis, the process of cell duplication, or reproduction, during which one cell gives rise to two genetically identical cells. If you know that, from on high you can distinguish the distinct halving of two landforms, but to be honest does it actually matter if they don’t?
Leaving Jencks behind you pass a signpost pointing towards the planet Jupiter which is between 893 and 964 million kilometres away. The reason for the uncertain range of distances is that the orbits that both the Earth and Jupiter make around the Sun are elliptical rather than “circular” so the distance from to another is constantly changing with those limits.
Looming over the carpark is one of Marc Quinn’s giant orchids. If you’re near London you may have seen a lot of them at Kew recently. For more on them see his website
This one is called ‘Love Bomb’ and it’s a multicoloured metal depiction of a mutant orchid that stands 12 m high. As Artland’s website suggests: “The sculpture stands out as a moment of excess and unnaturalness amidst the decidedly un-tropical surroundings of the Pentland Hills.” Like it or loathe it certainly stands out. It was the first of several “marmite” pieces.
Rivers by Tania Kovats
There are suggested routes around the site and so my friends and I set off, passing through newly planted woodland and several more marmite pieces before arriving at Rivers which consists of a hundred specimens of water collected by the artist Tania Kovats from a hundred different rivers around the British Isles. The specimens have been distilled and are stored in a hundred sealed museum-quality storage jars on shelves inside a boathouse over the duckpond. Is it art? Who knows?
On an island in the same duckpond there is a piece called Animitas by Christian Boltanski which has more than two hundred small Japanese bells, and streamers on long supports which chime in the wind [if you’re lucky!] and make what the artist calls ‘music of the souls’
The island with its Japanese bells and the boathouse in the background.
Next it was into the woods where Andy Goldsworthy, who ios based in Scotland, has a series of pieces. The first is Stone Coppice where he has placed large rocks among the growing branches of coppiced trees. As the trees grow they lift the rocks, often growing round them, so suggesting “a counterintuitive revelation of which of the elements in the piece is most powerful.” As Goldsworthy also said this ” will always be a work in progress, the future of which is not, and probably never will be, resolved.”
There’s a short video on the Jupiter Artland website about this piece if you want to know more
His other pieces are equally thought-provoking, especially the Stone House which looks normal from the outside but inside has been excavated to the bedrock creating a strangely eerie space [& one that’s difficult to photograph}
We’re used to mseing signs saying “please don’t touch the artworks” but to see a sign which says this site is under constant surveillance was a bit disconcerting, especially as it was surrounded by barbed wire and stood next to a narrow shaft of steps that decsended into the darkness. Then I noticed another which warned…
The light pours out of me by another Scottish based artist Anya Gallaccio is a contemporary grotto, paying a little tribute to the 18thc British landscape garden. The opening is surrounded by black obsidian, and down below in the small open chamber the walls are covered with nodules of amethyst.
A more immediately conventional take on the 18thc garden is Pablo Bronstein’s Rose Walk, which has a 25m long, but very narrow, path lined with standard and bush white roses. This runs between two delicate wooden pavilions, one Gothic the other influenced by Chinoiserie. The pavilions have a wonderfully light, almost frothy feel to them, but unfortunately the intervening space felt really constrained, especially when visitors were walking through.
Bronstein was born in Buenos Aires but now lives and works in London. His work always seems to have an architectural focus, [even when he’s designing cake decoration or other foodstuffs – honest!] and he says that he wanted to capture the sense of newness, of fresh paint etc that must have been felt in the villas of Twickenham and Strawberry Hill when such pavilions were first put up. His pavilions would certainly not been out of place there, as my fellow blogger the Folly Flaneuse said after her visit, they reminded her of Sir James Hall’s Willow Cathedral. “Hall’s theory, first published in 1797, was that early gothic architecture sought unconsciously to emulate the natural shapes of nature – the straights and curves of trunks, boughs and twigs becoming the columns, arches and tracery of the gothic. Bronstein’s site-specific Rose Walk likewise unites architecture and nature.”
The new pavilion – named the ballroom – and its garden
I was very taken with the courtyard garden in front of one of the new wings. Know as the Ballroom Garden it is planted mainly in contemporary style and houses the lovely 17thc dovecot – and a fountain made of ornamental snail shells, while the Ballroom gallery inside has been ornamented with amazing plasterwork.
Now back to the woods for some more “marmite” pieces.
Follow the links if you want to know more about any of them …
*Tracey Emin’s larger than life naked woman “I lay here for you”
*Anthony Gormley’s Firmament
- the eerie series of “Weeping Girls” by Laura Ford
*and the equally horribly eerie In Memory by Nathan Coley – a concrete-walled graveyard with tombstones with the names chiselled out.
*of course a series of pieces of Ian Finlay Hamilton, including this bust of Sappho.
Finally there was the area of The Steadings, the service quarters /farm yard of the house. It has the cafe, shop, a small exhibition space and the ice cream van.
Tucked away between it and the house was a secret garden area, in parts very traditional with yew hedging, classical busts and a fountain admittedly with bright green frogs , and then it opens out into the wonderfully bonkers and colourful Portuguese tiled swimming pool by Joana Vasconcelas.
from the Jupiter Artland website
It’s also worth noting that the site is more than just a gallery for contemporary sculpture. The owners are working closely with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to restore the land after years of neglect, creating shelter belts and increasing the diversity of tree species and cultivars. They have also made education one of their central principles, and they’ve set themselves the target of “engaging with every child in Scotland”which they do through a Learning Foundation. offering a huge range of educational initiatives and classes many of which are free and which so far have attracted more than 60,000 participants.
Jupiter Artland is open from May to September, so I was lucky to get there the last weekend they were open, but if you are ever nearby in the summer months make sure you get there. I can absolutely guarantee you won’t like everything but you’ll enjoythe surroundings and there’ll be enough amusing or thought-provoking exhibits to make it very much worth your while.
For more information there are plenty of reviews of exhibitions and visits online but you really can’t do much better than checking out their very informative website.
The Garden History Blog 
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