As I said at the end of my last post sets of heraldic beasts became rarer in Elizabethan times, as imagery became much more focussed on the queen herself. however there was a revival of interest in the early 19th century, and again more recently, as you can see in a slightly funkier way!
This is not an attempt at a comprehensive survey of heraldic beasts in gardens but just a brief look at a few sites, and as always, I’d love to hear from anyone about other places where they exist or existed.
A stone lion at Sheriff Hutton Hall.
Country Life Picture Library Published originally 15/09/1966
But lets start with a 17thc example…and no – this is not a concrete lion from a Jacobean bad-taste garden centre – at least I don’t think it is. I found references [using our database] to two new sets being created in the first half of the 17thc. Both were at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire where Sir Arthur Ingram built ‘a very fair new Lodge … with a fair garden enclosed with a brick wall with mount walks and fair ornaments’. He sent roses up from London with instructions to ‘set them at every corner of the knots and cut the privet into beasts ‘ (Ingram family papers quoted in Country Life, 1966). Maybe the privet didn’t take very well to being topiarised because in 1637 his son, Sir Thomas Ingram, employed Thomas Ventris, a sculptor of York, to carve twenty heraldic beasts in stone for the garden.
The garden front of Sheriff Hutton Hall.
Country Life Picture Library, originally publihsed 08/09/1966
Like so many other houses, Sheriff Hutton has undergone many changes, so although the lion in the photo, and its colleague on the other gatepost, may just possibly be survivors from Ingram’s set, I suspect they are more likely to date from the early 19thc when the grounds were remodelled. If anyone has any further information please let me know.
http://www.parksandgardens.org/places-and-people/site/2960/summary
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