Willow — Cartoon Dog Memorial Figure, Veterinary Memorial Garden, Guelph, Canada

A memorial garden is the one commission where the brief is mostly about what the piece must not be.

The brief

A veterinary teaching hospital had planted a small walled garden for clients who had lost an animal: a bench, a path, three trees, no plaques. The brief was short — a dog, seated, at the end of the path, and on no account a monument. No stone, no inscription, no raised plinth. It had to be a figure someone would sit down beside.

Why not stone

Stone is the obvious material for a garden memorial and the wrong one here. Ontario runs dozens of freeze-thaw cycles a winter: water sits in stone, expands, and opens it along its bedding planes. Joints open, and a crack in a memorial is not a maintenance item, it is an event. The shell is 6 mm laminated fibreglass over a stainless frame, which moves with frost instead of resisting it, and at 118 kg two people carried it down the path.

A finish that stays quiet

A gloss surface was the first proposal and it was rejected on sight: it reflects the sky and the visitors, and a memorial wants to be quiet. The finish is a chip coating in off-white, sage and ochre on a pale warm grey ground, sanded flat so the chips sit level rather than proud of it. Nothing on it is brighter than the planting around it: it reads as part of the garden rather than an object placed in it.

Rain, moss and the tops of things

A garden in this climate grows a green film on every upward face, and a dog has a lot of upward faces. The ears are raked back at 25 degrees, the back is one continuous dome with no flat area wider than 40 mm, and the head is tilted two degrees so water runs off the crown. There is no recess anywhere on the piece: no eye sockets, no collar groove, no gap between limb and body. Maintenance is a bucket, a cloth and four visits a year, written into the specification rather than discovered later.

In the garden

It sits at the far end of the gravel path, facing the bench, at the height where a seated adult’s shoulder is level with its head. What the hospital wrote about it is in the panel above.