Maymont Park

Maymont is a gorgeous park that man has put its influence on. Maymont Foundations says "The story of Maymont began in 1893, when a wealthy Richmond couple, James and Sallie Dooley, completed their elaborate Gilded Age estate on a site high above the James River. Upon their deaths and according to their wishes, Maymont—including its architectural complex, the 100-acre landscape, and a collection of exquisite furnishings—was left to the people of Richmond."

Some may comment is a park earth art? I believe Maymont has wonderful earth art embedded in it. In Overlay, it quotes Robert Smithson saying "Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal... Nature is never finished... Parks are finished landscapes for finished art. The museums and parks are graveyards above ground." However, I agree with writer of Overlay, Lucy Lippard, in that the mounds, circles, rows, and shelters of stone that have survived prehistoric "gardens" offer a framework for looking as "sculpture gardens" in museums, parks, bank plazas, or private estates. And in that "indoor sculptures in semi-public spaces deny the continuity with nature, site, and community that is a necessity for a living art." Many of the pictures below capture earth art and others just incaptured me and thought you would enjoy as well.

Maymont will always be special to be because this is where my husband proposed to me last March.