The Garden History Blog

The stumpery at Arundel Castle, from https://greatgardensforkids.wordpress.com

Imagine standing a load of dead trees on their heads and ‘planting’ them in your garden.  Does it sound like a good idea? or even a sane one ? Yet yet its been done by all sorts of people on for the last 150 years and more, including most famously, Prince Charles.

But not everyone sees the attraction of heaping up old tree stumps and making them a garden feature.  ‘When the Duke of Edinburgh first laid eyes upon the stacked-up tree roots of the Highgrove “stumpery”, he turned to Prince Charles and said, “When are you going to set fire to this lot?’ (Andy Sturgeon, Guardian 16th Dec 2006).

Anyway, having tried to make a small version in my own garden, and realising how difficult it is both as piece of design work but also simply as a physical task – tree stumps are big, cumbersome and extremely heavy – set me thinking about the origins of this rather strange garden feature. Like most posts that I’ve written, there’s more to the story than meets the eye, and I found myself following all sorts of byways and sidetracks, which will doubtless lead to more posts soon!

But now  read on to find how a painter who specialised in sea pictures, a fox hunting poet and a wealthy industrialist devised this quirky but charming Victorian oddity…and maybe where they got the idea from in the first place.

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