A sculptor makes great hedgeway

Sculpture, traditionally, has been a striking feature in many great gardens. Take, for example, the steep, terraced gardens below Powis Castle in Wales. There, a line of charming shepherds and shepherdesses, made of lead, gracefully embellish a balustrade. They belong to the late-17th or early 18th centuries, when the garden was first set out.

But today the garden boasts other unusual and far-more-arresting forms of "sculpture" - and these, in turn, have inspired a host of fresh work by one of Britain's outstanding contemporary sculptors, David Nash.

The "sculptures" Mr. Nash relishes are alive: great old yew bushes and hedges that have been shaped over centuries by a unique combination of neglect and care, freedom to grow and appreciative trimming.

Nash's photographs, pastel drawings, reliefs, and sculptures in wood pay tribute to these "organic shapes" (to use his phrase). They are currently the subject of an exhibition traveling in Britain and a fascinating new book called "Twmps" (published by Oriel 31 and Seren).

Though the stepped terraces of the Powis gardens, constructed in the strictly formal Italian or French style, are still intact, they are no longer gardened in a regimented manner. Nor are they punctuated and edged with geometrically clipped specimens of yew or box. Some of these specimens have disappeared. But others have developed into the unprecedented forms so admired by Nash.

A stepped yew hedge at the eastern end of the terraces is a deep-green cumulus cloudscape of close-knit foliage. This massive natural formation reaches up 40 feet.

And what was once a line of small, neatly clipped yew obelisks, precisely spaced, is now an irregular row of enormous green mounds merging into one another, leaning and bulging. Some of these forms flop or lean over terrace walls like heaps of green snow, as if half melted but suddenly frozen again.

In their present state, they have earned the pet name of "twmps," coined from a Welsh word meaning "pile" or "mound."

These yews are immensely unusual and free, yet they are not at all unkempt. Their clipped mossy canopies have a molded, mossy density. The twmps, Nash writes, have "escaped geometric structure."

But they have found a new structure instead.

Nash's own sculpture has long been integrally involved with trees, tree growth, and wood. Some of his works actually consist of planted trees. He explores an interface between natural form and sculptured form. His concept of art is not an imposition of will on the natural, so much as a perception of contexts where art and nature can coincide.

So his fascination for the Powis twmps, in a famous garden not impossibly far from his rather remote studio and home, should perhaps not seem surprising. His celebratory response to them, however, is - as even the few images on this page indicate.

Nash's art has more than once before crossed conventional boundaries separating arboriculture from sculpture, plant life from art life.

With the Powis twmps, however, it is more than simply a matter of the hedges feeding his art. His art also pays tribute to the horticultural skills and sensitivity that have helped turn them into what he calls "art of our time."