Lulah Ellender is captivated by Henry Moore – and more – at Kew Wakehurst

At this point in the endless summer, rain feels like an abstract concept. It is early in the morning, but the heat is already building. Either side of the path from the entrance at Wakehurst everything is bleached and dry, the sun bouncing relentlessly off every surface. Fires are rampaging across Europe and it seems like a matter of time before they take hold here. While the destruction and horror are undeniable, fire also plays an important generative role in the lifecycle of many plant species, sparking tree cones to open and seeds to disperse. Like the distorted giant redwood growing near the path, leaning at an unnatural angle and dripping with molten leaves.

It primes my mind with thoughts of misshapenness and twisted forms before I even get to the sculptures I have come to see. Wakehurst is well known for its pioneering Millennium Seed Bank, a repository for 2.5 billion wild plant seeds that aims to preserve 40,000 species against extinction. It is also home to a diverse range of plants across 500 acres, from meadows and botanical gardens to prairies and ponds. This summer it is the backdrop for four Henry Moore sculptures – bronzes created from a melted copper and tin alloy cast using a lost-wax process.

More heat and creation. Moore believed sculpture belonged outdoors, and worked in open spaces when he could, whether that was his family’s garden in Norfolk or his home in Hertfordshire. He drew constant inspiration from landscape, noting: ‘There is in Nature a limitless variety of shapes and rhythms.’ Bones, trees, organic shapes, pebbles, hillsides and curves all ripple through his work, folding into the forms he creates but also providing vistas and counterpoints to his sculptures. He believed: ‘Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature.’

His reclining forms fit perfectly into Wakehurst’s landscape, resembling fallen trees or lumpen bodies stretching out on the lawn. Their surfaces are scratched and greening, the limbs twisted and moulded together so that legs resemble a mermaid’s tail. Nipples and eyes are indistinguishable, faces sliced flat. The distortions are somehow beautiful, like the strange ghostly tree by the path.

The prairie is just coming into its own, with a carpet of eryngium yuccifolium dotted with smooth-leaved asters, helianthus, rudbeckia, echinacea, prairie dropseed and veronicastrum visible through the games console-like hole in Moore’s Reclining Connected Forms. These voids are an important part of his work, constituting a kind of conversation between the statue and surrounding space. Holes curate our view and encourage us to look beyond and through the solidity of the bronze. The gap leads me on through the prairie towards a small garden near the main house, where I encounter Moore’s Mother and Child: Block Seat.

‘Encounter’ is the wrong word. It stops me and holds me in place. The ‘Madonna and Child’ figure is an iconic, omnipresent motif in Western art, and a self-professed ‘fundamental obsession’ of Moore’s. From the front this piece represents a woman holding a child – open-palmed, nurturing, gentle. But what strikes me is the back. While the front conveys care and love, the hollowed, distorted spine speaks of the physical toll motherhood takes on a woman’s body.

I walk round and round the sculpture, fascinated by the etched skin, deformed breasts, egg-like child, thinking of one of my favourite paintings by Hammershøi – a standing woman shown from behind, shoulders stooping as she goes about some domestic task. There is the same quiet steadfastness and power in this sculpture. The only void here is created by the gap between the arm and torso; the rest of the form dissolves muscularly into itself. But I am still thinking about anatomical gaps and spaces. To be specific, the void where my womb used to be. The place that grew my children, the forms my flesh grew around, now gone, my body filling the space like Moore’s wax casting. I think of the stretch marks, sunspots and post-surgery scars that make up the topography of my body in middle age, and marvel at how Moore captures it all so elegantly. The mess and labour of motherhood and aging. The body as receptacle of memory.

In search of shade, I walk through the woodland beyond the seed bank, time travelling with the scent of the pine trees that takes me back to my first love in a French campsite, the sound of eucalyptus leaves that reminds me of my time in Australia. As well as Moore’s sculptures, Wakehurst is showing works by contemporary artists: Paloma Varga Weisz’s bizarre half-animal, half-human figures that look like they’re made from pinched clay; Walter Bailey’s latticework that looks like a flame licking above the prairie’s blooms; Rana Begum’s grid-like structure filled with light and crafted from Wakehurst’s own fallen timber, and Rafael Pérez Evans’ Horizontals that invite us to ‘pause and be held’.

I realise I have not talked much about the garden here. But these ruminatory meanderings are part of the beauty of landscapes – this one has worked on me, much as they worked on Moore’s imagination. Even here, in a controlled, cultivated place, there is space to explore, reflect and be enchanted.

Lulah Ellender is the author of the memoirs Elisabeth’s Lists (Granta 2018) and Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden (Granta 2022