The Dripstone Wall Garden, Prague

 

We ran across this spooky dripstone wall last week when visiting Prague in the Czech Republic. It was in the Wallenstein Palace Garden which did have many other more conventional sections, but this was the part of the garden worth writing home about. Or a blog post about.

Within the dripstone, once in a while, you could make out a scary face, animals, reptiles, secret passages, fake windows, faux caves, claws, allusions to corridors, and other spooky things. It is aptly named the Grotesquery.

We saw it first from the grounds of the Prague Palace, way far above the garden, and thought it was some sort of monument. It was created in the 1620s, by Italian garden designers. The background is a great texture contrast to the trees, shrubs and perennials planted in front of the wall.

I will not be adding a dripstone wall to my own garden (but would love to have a parliament of owls!), but liked this wall and would to have loved to have seen how they light it at night!

Great texture background for these shrubs & climbers.

It was BIG! It covers the sides of a two-plus story building and a a tall stone wall.

Dwarfs even the trees.

Nearer the building, the dripstone "merges" with the conventional architecture to create Gothic details.

You can barely see him here, but there's an owl hiding in a dripstone nook.

Most of the rest of the garden were formal and
Italianate-inspired -- sculpture, symmetry and lots o' boxwoods.

A nice maze design was cool. Though it could have used some trimming.

Formal gardens aren't necessarily my thing...

...but I do love a good espalier.

The wall was behind trees, so you had to be close to it to see it - it was most imposing from right beneath it,
I would guess it was intentional to have the trees there to force you to get up close to see the wall --
because up close you had no choice but to look straight up.