Recently I’ve been reading Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols written in 1951 about a 5 acre rundown Georgian estate he bought after WWII.  An avid gardener he wrote:

I noticed something else.  At each end of this lovely little wall there were two brick pillars. They stood there, perfectly poised, exactly the right height, exactly the right width. But in spite of their architectural rightness they were wrong, or rather, they were incomplete. They had obviously been built to hold something – carved pineapples, or stone balls, or…or…or Urns.  It was when the word Urns came into my head that the garden was born.

 

 
Inspired, I went searching for urns in Haberfield.  I didn’t have to venture far from home on foot when I spotted a number of urns at the foot of front steps of houses in adjoining streets. I stopped there. How many are there in Haberfield? Not known as a Federation garden feature it became obvious that this Victorian Era trend must have spilt into the Federation Period.
Is it time to resurrect those urns now hiding underneath hedges or out the back? I’ve been told they no longer make them, so finding them from second hand places is the next option but may be a challenge. One definition that Google offers is ‘A garden urn planter is a special container, usually made of cast stone or other heavy material. Unlike conventional planters, urns offer gardeners a unique opportunity to express elegant planting arrangements.”
 
Throughout history, ashes of the dead have been deposited in urns, giving them symbolic importance. Frequently urns were used for memorials and monuments, especially in cemeteries. In the context of the designed landscape, treatise writers often strongly recommended that the vase be placed on top of a pedestal or plinth so that it would be easily visible. A. J. Downing elaborated upon this point in an 1836 article about architecture and at greater length in his 1849 treatise, when he explained that without such a placement, the vase would appear as a temporary, accidental introduction to the landscape. A permanent base, in his opinion, gave the vase the “character of art, at once more dignified and expressive of stability.
I stop here as I fear I’m getting carried away, but preserving a little bit of history in our gardens is something to be passionate about.  Don’t you agree?