The Heinen team recently completed a landscape refresh for a well-known Mission Hills home (with a memorable sculpture!)
It’s not every day one sees pigs fly – or so the old adage goes. But you might get close if you’ve noticed a larger-than-life sculpture in front of a local Mission Hills home. Perched on a boulder in front of the modern home is a sculpture titled “Dream Big” – a large, bronze sculpture of a winged mother pig, perched atop a boulder, gazing down at a smaller winged pig at ground level.
According to the homeowner, the mother pig, named Angelina, is looking down on her baby pig, named Spike. Spike has his own pair of little wings and stands on his back legs with his front legs leaning against the boulder to get a closer look up at his mother. When pigs fly, huh? With this sculpture one can visualize the activity being more than a big dream, it looks more like an inevitable reality!
This stunning sculpture was made by American artist, Margery Torrey. As a Signature Member of the Society of Animal Artists, Torrey is an artist known for creating a broad range of bronze sculptures of birds and animals showcasing the beauty of nature. According to her biography, Torrey’s mission is “to raise awareness and appreciation for a quickly disappearing natural world.”
It would not be an understatement to note that pigs hold a special place in the homeowners’ hearts. In fact, they are avid collectors of artist renderings’ of pigs and, have amassed an eclectic collection of over a hundred pigs depicted in art from around the world. Inside their exquisite contemporary home, they prominently display their collection of wooden, metal, sterling silver, ceramic, and crystal pigs on specially-designed shelves and in a series of beautiful display cases. It would not be a stretch to say that a large pig sculpture in front of the home is not a surprising addition to the couple’s friends and family.
The homeowners became fans of Torrey’s work after seeing one of her pig sculptures while traveling. The couple spoke to the artist and subsequently commissioned Torrey to cast a sculpture of a mother pig with a baby in her iconic bronze style. For this particular sculpture, Torrey worked with the homeowners to design a sculpture that would include an existing boulder as a base, a boulder on which the mother pig now stands upon. The finished sculpture demonstrates the beauty of these animals in their dynamic, yet stoic, poses – and, with the inclusion of right-sized wings for both mother and baby, adds more than a small touch of intended irony.
To display their beautiful new sculpture, the homeowners had a previous landscaper install shrubs and trees on a landscape island that echoed the couple’s Colorado-inspired landscaping. But time had begun to wear on the plantings and drainage issues were beginning to spring up around the statue. The homeowners’ new trees, which had been flourishing, were also beginning to show distress. A quick investigation by the Heinen crew revealed that the trees’ root balls had not been properly untied after transport and planting. A piece of sturdy twine was literally choking off the trunk of the tree from its roots, limiting its ability to grow properly. What could have been a very costly mistake was quickly righted by the Heinen team without having to replace the trees.
After mending the tree issues, the Heinen team installed new metal flashing separating the landscape island’s mulch areas around the sculpture from the circle drive to keep the mulch from washing out during rainstorms. Finally, the Heinen crew gave the entire landscape area a general clean-up – trimming shrubs and trees and clearing away unwanted debris, and adding fresh mulch. After all, a sculpture so beautiful (and certainly one with the name “Dream Big”) deserves to have nothing less than beautiful natural surroundings!
