Garden Ornament | Horizontal Sundial Vs Vertical Sundial
To set an horizontal sundial will ask for more space. Not only will you need the room for the sundial itself, but the room for people to gather around. Better you plan from start to build it using a material that can endure almost anything, since your guests will used it as a bar and put their glass on it, your gardener will find it a handy shelf, your kid will climb on it to play the garden statue, and pigeons will leave, well, what pigeons usually leave on outside decorative elements.
You will choose a material that is at least washable and waterproof -forget marble if you do not intend to varnish your dial each year.
You may make a sundial small enough to prevent people from using it as a bar, a shelf or a pedestal, but you will lose a part of its decorative potential.
The vertical sundial has to stand facing South. Most people nail it against a wall of the house. Since it is rare that a house has the exact orientation you need, it is often possible to add a wedge between the dial and the wall so that the sundial faces the right direction.
A very decorative way of setting a vertical sundial: the arch. You make stand an arch (any strong frame will do the trick) along an imaginary line that goes West-East, so that the dial hanging from its top will be oriented North-South.
When hanging that way, a vertical sundial shows two faces. People usually think that the face that looks towards South is the only one that tells time; but the sun of the earliest and of the latest hours of the Summer days casts a shadow on the Northern dial as well, providing that a style has been fixed on it. I will not say that to have to design two faces to make a sundial makes it easier to do, but it is worth the extra time and work: you will have a sundial as decorative as original.
Gabrielle Guichard is a French teacher and author, with a passion for sundials and tapestries. If you do not want to make all the calculations by yourself, you can find ready-to-use sundial plans at http://planstomakeasundial.com.
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