Felix’s mystic garden where Bob sings to Woody forever

What a strange thing to find near Shakespeare’s home.

A bronzed, atrophied image of Bob Dylan playing guitar for his hero and sometime-mentor Woody Guthrie.

The pair are frozen in time in a pasture of plenty in a mysterious outcrop called the Garden of Heroes & Villains. They are surrounded by paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

It’s a beautiful peaceful enigmatic place in someone’s back garden deep in rural Warwickshire in the UK and somehow it captures the reverence of Bob’s short-lived friendship with Woody.

He had become obsessed with the man after borrowing a copy of Woody’s autobiography Bound for Glory from a classmate in the very early 60s.

Almost immediately he was mimicking Woody’s speech and is said to have told Cafe Wha? when he arrived in New York for a concert: “I been travellin’ around the country, followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.”

Woody was by incarcerated at the Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, suffering from Huntingdon’s disease.

It finally killed him in 1967.

But Bob played part of Song to Woody for him as he lay in bed.
Muhammad Ali and Lawrence of Arabia are also among the many heroes welcoming people to south Warwickshire.

The Dorsington garden belonged to the late millionaire publisher and poet Felix Dennis, and has more than 50 life-size bronze sculptures.

Felix, who wanted to create a 30,000 acre forest in the heart of England, died in 2014, but his project goes on and 1.6 million trees have been planted since 1996.

Felix began commissioning bronze sculpture in the mid 1990s and set about creating a private showcase garden at his home with trees, ponds, streams, a yew maze and dry stone walls.

The idea was to show ‘freeze-frame’ moments in the lives of the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Bruce Lee, Billie Holiday, William Shakespeare and even King Kong.

Song to Woody

I’m out here, thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
I’m a-singin’ you this song, but I can’t sing enough
‘Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done

Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do

#woodyguthrie #bobdylan #mysticgarden #felixdennis #warwickshire #heroesandvillians
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too