19. Sundial

You are standing on the oval driveway where carriages circled around past a sundial to reach the front door of Vassar’s cottage. A sundial was an important minor element in Downing’s lexicon of embellishment. In his A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, he characterized sundials as “among the oldest decorations for the garden and grounds, and there are scarcely any which we think more suitable.”