High Quality Pergolas in Welwyn Garden City
Go Japanese with a pergola or two
The Japanese have been at the forefront of garden design for centuries. Few other cultures have mastered the beauty of the garden quite like them. With their careful placement of rocks, stones, plants and structures, the Japanese garden is truly a thing of beauty that is hard to beat.
Although many people associate the pagoda with the Japanese garden, the pergola is just as at home in these floral and enigmatic settings.
The Japanese pagoda
Pagodas in Japan historically derive from the Chinese pagoda, itself an interpretation of the Indian stupa. Like the stupa, pagodas were originally used as reliquaries but in many cases they ended up losing this function. Pagodas are quintessentially Buddhist and an important component of Japanese Buddhist temple compounds but, because until the Kami and Buddha’s Separation Act of 1868, a Shinto shrine was normally also a Buddhist temple and vice versa, they are not rare at shrines either. The famous Itsukushima Shrine, for example, has one.
After the Meiji Restoration the word tō, once used exclusively in a religious context, came to mean also “tower” in the western sense, as for example in Blackpool tower.
Of the Japanese pagoda’s many forms, some are built in wood, but most are carved out of stone. Wood pagodas are large buildings with either two stories or an odd number of stories. Extant wood pagodas with more than two storeys have almost always either three stories or five. Stone pagodas are nearly always small, usually well below three metres, and as a rule offer no usable space.
The Japanese pergola
The Japanese pergola often differs from the more Western designs. Pergolas we are used to seeing in the West tend to be made up from rather straight and simple uprights and beams. The emphasis tends to be on keeping the structure rather simple and functional, primarily to enable ease of growth for climbers and vines.
The Japanese pergola will frequently have a more curved design, particularly at the outside ends of the roof beams. The oriental pergolas appear to favour a far more ornate and decorative finish that really set them apart from their Western counterparts.
One thing is certain though, the Japanese pergola is an outstanding thing of beauty, particularly when combined with a bamboo deer scarer, water features, and stone washing bowls and Acer trees.
The Japanese garden, with an authentic pergola is a place where deep meditation and mental wellbeing are promoted, which is why so many people try to emulate the tranquillity of a Japanese garden design.
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Welwyn Garden City for literary history
Set on the outskirts of Welwyn Garden City is Shaw’s Corner. This lovely country property was the primary residence of the well known Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The house and grounds is now a National Trust property open to the public as a writer’s house museum. Inside the house, the rooms remain much as the author and playwright left them, and the garden and Shaw’s writing hut, where he wrote much of his work can also be visited. The house is an Edwardian Arts and Crafts-influenced structure situated in the small village of Ayot St Lawrence. Although it is six miles from Welwyn Garden City, many regard the Ayots as being part of Welwyn Garden City.
Shaw’s Corner was built as the new rectory for the village during 1902; the house was the home of playwright George Bernard Shaw from 1906 until his death in 1950. The property was designed by local architects and locally sourced materials were used in its construction. The Church of England decided that the house and grounds were too large for the size of the parish it served, and let it instead. Shaw and his wife Charlotte Payne-Townshend relocated in 1906, and eventually bought the house and its land in 1920, paying the princely sum of £6,220. At the same time the garden was extended and Shaw bought land from his friend Apsley Cherry-Garrard, bringing the total to three and a half acres.
George Bernard Shaw is known to have written many of his major works in the secluded, home-built revolving hut that still remains at the bottom of his garden. The small hut of only sixty four square feet was built on a central steel-pole frame with a circular track so that it could be rotated on its axis to follow the arc of the Sun’s light during the day. Shaw named the hut “London” in a clever ruse to fool visitors he didn’t want to see that he was away visiting the capital.
The London blitz of 1940–41 led the couple, by this time both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence near Welwyn Garden City. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, possibly because of the proximity of the airfield at nearby Hatfield and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in the September of that year.
After Shaw and his wife died, their ashes were taken to Shaw’s Corner, mixed and then scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.
Welwyn Garden City has retained theatrical connections
Welwyn Garden City has continued to have a love affair with theatre. The Welwyn Thalians and the Barn Theatre, along with Campus West theatre being places where locals from the Welwyn Garden City area and beyond can go to appreciate theatrical offerings from various groups.