Rethinking "The Water Walk"

It is time to deal with The Water Walk.  A while back we realized something had gone horribly wrong here.  The Water Walk, linking the Main Courtyard and The West Wing Garden, was intended to be part of a tour de force of classic axial landscape design. Take a look at the photograph below, taken last summer, and you will see the problem.

Check out the position of the four persimmon trees. They are not symmetrically aligned within the design. It all looks unresolved and really, really wrong. We have been talking about digging up the persimmon trees and moving them.  Midwinter is the right time to do this but it is a horrid, backbreaking  job and would set the trees back years.  Fortunately there might be another solution. Our Head Gardener's partner, local chef Jay Fraser, figured out that instead of moving the trees we needed to realign the axis. How?  By relocating one of the two urns. These urns now sit symmetrically on each side of a new axial line which runs straight between the persimmon trees. The photo at the top of this page shows this realignment.  The urn on the left has been shifted, so the urns are closer than before and the axis has now moved to the right.

The fact that one of the raised troughs which will form The Water Walk will now be wider than the other, as shown by the lines of bricks, doesn't seem to matter one jot.  So now it looks like this problem can be solved more easily than we had feared; like they say, "There is more than one way to skin a cat".  To see more on The Water Walk click here