Analemmatic dials

Leidsche Hout Park, Leyden

Our friends Frans and Maria know the city of Leyden inside out, but even they had difficulty locating this sundial. The Leidsche Hout Park covers hundreds of acres, and you really don't see the dial until you are almost on top of it. Thanks to their fieldwork, though, I was able to get here anyway.

In case you really want to go there, the dial is located in the western corner of the park. Look out for this post, which once carried the instructions for use.

The Public Gardens Department doesn't like to be bothered by such 'works of art' when mowing the grass. The tiles have therefore been sunk deeply into the green. Fortunately, their lettering can't be missed, the white characters standing out clearly. By the way, this is the first sundial I have seen that adds the unit name ('uur' means 'hour') to the hour marks. Just in case one might have doubts... The dial reads daylight saving time. Its major axis of 10 m (33 ft) makes it quite a fat boy.

Large tiles carrying bright white text mark the date line. The characters are too large, as a matter of fact, leading to those nasty hyphen-ations. And why are they arranged in such a jumbled fashion? March, April, September and October should take up about the same amount of space along the date line. So why not arrange them all the same way, preferably parallel to the other months? That would leave some green space in between, which would not be too much of a problem.

You are right when you sense a story behind all this. The tiles have been used in a sundial at the 1992 Floriade, a decennial plant exhibition in the Netherlands. It was laid out by the Botanical Gardens of Leyden University, if I'm correct. The creator (let him remain unknown) based his design on the defective analemmatic dial in the National Heritage Museum in Arnhem. The Dutch Sundial Society was completely ignorant about this project. Which was the more bizarre as they had beforehand attempted to arouse the Floriade authorities' interest in a sundial - without success!
The information got through only after the Floriade had been closed. The dial's components were stored at the municipal works department of Leyden and were finally reassembled here. The tiles were much too large, however, so that's why some cheating had to take place with respect to the date line...

Location: 52.2° N, 4.5° E
Design: Botanical Garden, Leyden University?
Inauguration: June 1994