Excerpts from brief addressed to Alejandro Zaero-Polo (FOA) on 21 July 2004

The brief requires the complete re-landscaping of an early nineteenth century D-shaped walled garden of about an acre. The site is beautiful. The walled garden Canadian couple, Nori and Sandra Pope, who have been there fifteen years and have created a garden, and plant-selling business, built around a huge technical knowledge of the plants themselves, and very sophisticated associations of colour. The point here is that this is a garden for extremely knowledgeable gardeners. It works remarkably well from the level of individual plants upwards but the “architecture” of the garden itself has never particularly interested them until now.

There has not, in any case, been the opportunity for a major reconsideration of the layout and contouring of the planting, which remain as configured thirty-five years ago by my mother, who was attempting to make something orthogonal out of an irregular shape. In fact, of course the original walls respond very well, if fortuitously, both to the contour, and considerations of climate; the original landscape morphology, as perceived by the wall builders, is still pretty much intact. What the space needs therefore is a scheme that acknowledges the dramatic fall and rise of the ground, and the odd shape within the wall, and makes the most of the very intensive planting of flowers and vegetables that the Popes are good at, and people now expect from the site.

At the same time I am interested in bridging the gap between architecture and an understanding of planting left open by the general failure (which we discussed) of landscape architects to follow through on their ideas. In large landscapes this presents mostly as an inability to think at the right scale; in this particular project the issue is to rigorously go beyond anaemic, applied, decoration. This is much harder than it seems; a clear ‘functional’ programme for a landscape is a good starting point, and I am responding here in part to this aspect of your Barcelona and Toronto schemes- more perhaps than to what you proposed or built there.

Whilst remaining the focus of the garden, any scheme would have to accommodate an ongoing process of integrating the walled area visually with the larger landscape, in particular the very dense forestry on the hills to the north, east and west, and the eighteenth-century parkland to the south.

I am proposing a simplication of the planting in the area immediately outside the wall so that what is inside is that much more dramatic. We are in the early stages of building a sequence of pools and ponds, finishing in a smal lake, which reinforce an east-west axis to the Main House. Eventually, and probably within the next five years, I will have to address the whole entry sequence of the public to garden. This will almost certainly involve new car parking, traffic management, plant selling facilities, etc at the north-west of the walled garden. Finally, both the pool sequence and the re-planning of the walled garden bring into question the present site of the wooden tower that Peter Smithson built for me three years ago. It is easily moved, so a nice small addendum to the brief would be for the designers to have a strong voice in this discussion.

The present impetus for the project is that the Pope’s are now less energetic than they were, and will eventually retire. I need to reconfigure the garden in a form that gives a better platform for their planting expertise (perhaps with less hard work)and that might eventually provided an opportunity for a younger generation of gardener with different ideas.

There is also the tricky issue of anticipating climate change, and a need to extend the period over which the garden is at its peak (now May to July).

The project is likely to be constrained by:

Money, as always. If it is going to be done at all, I will do it properly; on the other hand I would like the cost to bear some relation to the long term viability of estate operations. In this context, it is worth saying that the principal motive for keeping the garden open to the public is that it is good to be able to offer some jobs locally that do not just involve servicing my stockbroker domestic tenants. The traditional agricultural economy is no longer really functioning; the pattern of production is moving rapidly towards small specialised, usually organic, activity. This will with time radically change the landscape; the challenge is to make out of this, in the woodland and the fields on the estate, a new and more interesting functional aesthetic.

A preference, and practice, on my part for locally available building skills and materials ( I should add that concrete, corrugated iron, and railway sleepers were, until recently, as much a part of the agricultural landscape as local stone).

An architectonic characteristic of what has been built on the estate over the last three hundred years is a tendency either not to employ architects, or to forget their names in a generation or two. A lot of what is good was additive and reactive. At least to the casual visitor there has to remain an uncertainty about whether an architectural statement has been intended, or made, at all. This is not to say that I am interested in anything but real architecture, just wary of bombast.

Planning issues – maybe. The walled garden is Grade II.

Let me know if all this intrigues you. It wont make you rich. Now is the best time to say no, but I would be disappointed. I am not for the moment approaching anybody else, mostly because I cant think of another practice that would bring the appropriate rigour. ‘

The “Public” Garden at Hadspen | Niall Hobhouse on the 3rd May 2005

• The future management of this area needs to be resolved within the next three years. The Popes’ desire to advance their withdrawal from active day-to-day management, or altogether, has made the need for a plan both more pressing, and in some respects, more complicated.
• My fundamental position on this is that there is no point in having a garden open to the public unless it offers an experience which is in some way exceptional- as the Hadspen Garden has been in two previous incarnations.
  I’m anxious therefore to think very boldly, and also, as far as possible, to make public opening contingent on a very successful new design.
• Resolving a plan for the future could involve reducing or eliminating the “paying” footprint or enlarging it; the plant sales business may be an appropriate and profitable adjunct, or it may not.
• Whatever route is adopted, I am clear that the “D” walled garden should be the focus of any new design. The remaining area currently open to the public should be simplified, or given over to the private area of the Main House. In all events, I want to remove the service buildings and the greenhouses ( if a need for them is ongoing) to a site removed from their current position as accretions to the walled area.
• I have commissioned Foreign Office Architects to produce a scheme for the walled “D”, which will be ready for consideration by September 2005. This consideration will, obviously, depend upon its formal qualities, but also deliverability, cost, and the evolution of discussions on future management which this note has occasioned .
• We would expect to implement the construction of the new landscape in Autumn 2006, for completion Spring 2007.
  
• Foreign Office has been asked for a scheme that specifically allows for the introduction of different or evolving planting approaches. The metaphor for their work has them providing a platform, or stage, on which successive plantsmen or gardeners can perform in the future.
• It’s possible that we will hold a competition for a new planting scheme in time for the summer of next year, and in response to the detailed architectural project.
• I take the view that any garden is only as good as its current gardeners. A bold new landscape design may become one of the routes for finding new gardeners for Hadspen, with the same sense of long-term ‘ownership’ as the Popes were able to take
• NH has commissioned an analysis of available options in relation to the plant sales business from Kim Gray, working with Nori and Sandra. The priority is to establish:- whether a plant-selling business can be managed independently of the public garden, (whatever it then consists of); the contribution it might make to garden admissions income; and the scope for expansion into the sale of local- or estate-produced merchandise… ie I need to know if the plant sales business is strong enough on its own to be worth preserving and expanding, and the management options; all this given that there remains an uncertainty in the short term about the future of the Hadspen Garden as a public destination.
• I have discussed with Nori and Sandra the possibility of using next season to simplify the Peach Walk, pond, and tea house areas, whilst keeping the planting in the walled garden pro tem in more or less the form in which it is now presented to the public.

IF the new garden is really good – both as architecture and as planting – the public will want to come. Again, I want to reserve the final decision as to whether they will be encouraged to do so until the outcome is clear. I certainly do not want to go on opening the garden just because it is open now.

Letter addressed to Nori and Sandra Pope (whom have been running the garden since the 1980’s) on 10 September 2004

“Dear Sandra and Nori, Thank you both for your time the other weekend, and for engaging with the really painful question of imagining the garden at some time in the future when you can no longer be there. We three should see Alejandro and Farshid’s involvement at this stage as a therapy.

I thought you should see the first cut of the brief that I sent them before their visit last month, and a long note I have just written in response to the request for “clarification” of what should happen inside the walled garden. These both may go much too far in defining the programme before getting your input; any comments would be gratefully received. I have also enclosed copies of some of the enclosures that I sent to them. We also need to begin to give them more information at a technical level, where I really don’t know what I am talking about. I attach a list of questions; certainly these are not necessarily the right ones, but they are aimed to stimulate our thinking. If you had a chance, I would be grateful if you could make some notes in response to these, or anything else, before 10th October, when I have promised them the full package.

They will then come back to me in due course with some ideas; If we then go forward the next stage would be for you and them and meet without me. That is, my aim is to table as much information as possible at this stage, and then to let you technicians get on with it, with a free hand.

The point, as always, is to do as much thinking as possible before anybody starts drawing.

Love,

Niall Hobhouse

Questions for Sandra & Nori.

1. Do you see your taste in plants and planting evolving in any particular direction?

2. How would your gardening public react to a year in which the garden was closed? Or to a radical reconfiguration of the walled garden?

3. Do you think it is realistic for me to look for a new layout that would accommodate the tastes and preferences of succeeding generations of gardeners?

4. What are the technical problems that have to be overcome to simplify the amount of work that you have to do each year in the garden? - disposal of rubbish, control of disease, watering, access etc.

5. What is the disease problem associated with planting against the walls? Would terracing at around a metre high produce retaining walls that had the same associated problems?

6. Should we be worrying about wheelchairs?

7. What is your take on Climate Change?

8. Do you think we should be trying to extend the optimum gardening season? How might your planting change to accommodate this?

9. Do vegetables HAVE to be grown in the open for ease of access, or any other reason?

10. What is the maximum practical depth of a border?

11. Assuming a simplified planting outside - say a reversion to fruit in the Peach Walk - and a “broader” planting scheme within the walled garden, do you feel like guessing at the labour requirement (hired-help)? The ideal statistic would be annual labour cost, per 100m of border.

12. Can one simplify the planting, which you referred to, without losing the sense of the garden evolving through the year, or of the ‘carefully careless’?

13. Is there a radical difference between the expectation of your coach tourists and your regulars? How important are the coaches to the business?

14. How many visitors come to look at plants on an individual basis? Would a reduction in the diversity and number of plants directly effect the volume of plant sales?

15. If you were running a business, not trying to make a garden, which way would you take the Hadspen garden at this point?

16. Is your “serious gardener” clientele more stable than the casual visitor, ie do the serious ones keep coming even in a bad year?

17. Do people come for their children, or are the children just dragged along?

18. Do the people who walk regularly in the woods also come to the garden, and vice-versa?

19. What would you identify as the current fashionably smart trend in serious gardening?

20. What would attract a bright young star in the gardening world to Hadspen, whether entrepreneurial or not?

21. Tell me frankly whether the opportunity for somebody like this to make a brand new beginning would be more potent than the idea of an apprenticeship with you both. Are you really interested in creating a succession?

22. Would you ulitimately find it just too painful to put a bulldozer through everything that is currently in the Walled Garden? Or a thrill?

23. What would you do in my situation?

24. What issues haven’t I thought about?

25. Am I mad?

For FOA:

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE WALLED GARDEN?

Summary Things - climate, plants, expertise, fashion, expectation, use - change, and they change most dramatically within a planted landscape.

Should the designer embrace this uncertainty?

Why pose this as a problem to an architect - not to a landscape designer?

Does the Popes’ particular, and very technically informed, approach - to plants and to planting - itself suggest answers to the questions above?

In what follows, ‘garden’ and ‘landscape’ are used fairly interchangeably, reflecting current art-historical fashion and my own preference on the ground for treating the two as one.

1. As a starting point- and from my original note to FOA :

“What the space needs therefore is a scheme that acknowledges the dramatic fall and rise of the ground, and the odd shape within the wall, and makes the most of the very intensive planting of flowers and vegetables that the Popes are good at, and people now expect from the site……. I need to reconfigure the garden in a form that gives a better platform for the Popes planting expertise (perhaps with less hard work) and that eventually provides an opportunity for a younger generation of gardeners with different ideas……there is also the tricky issue of anticipating climate change, and the need to extend the period at which the garden is at its peak (now May to July).”

2. I do not agree with our good friend Richard S, who says the key decision is whether or not the garden should remain open to the public in the long term. Any scheme must work either as a private or as a public garden, but we assume that it will remain open to the public for the moment.

3. This sort of reflexivity is at the heart of the decision to ask for a proposal from a firm of architects, rather than of landscape architects. That is, an architect may be able to provide a structural form on which a plantsman/gardener, or gardeners in an unfolding sequence, are free to do what they do best. The professional polarity provides the opportunity for collaboration; gardeners and landscape architects are sure to fight.

4. Apart from remaining open to the public under the Popes, or other gardeners, or being reincorporated into the private garden of the main house, there is another, less likely, alternative. This is, that I build in due course a house, or houses, in close relation to the walled garden, for which it becomes the recreational retreat.

5. Any garden is only as good as its current gardener. Trying to preserve this one as it is after the Popes leave is both cheerless, and pointless. With this in mind, the three most likely management scenarios in the future are as follows:

a. The Popes semi-retire in three years or so, but continue their association with the garden as consultants presiding over a simplified and less intensive planting scheme, with more and more of the physical labour done at their direction.

b. The Popes retire in three years or so, and between us we succeed in identifying a younger gardener, who sees the site as his or her blank canvas, just as they did when they first came. The site is prestigious enough to attract somebody like this, but the task of finding the right person is much harder than it sounds. It is any case unlikely that one would find the same combination of gardening and entrepreneurial skills, so the Estate would have to assume a broader role in the commercial structure.

c. I might become sufficiently engaged in the “gardening” aspect of landscape to take a larger role in the planting myself. Realistically, I am never going to be knowlegable or energetic enough to do this at a tight enough scale, or in sufficient complexity; so this route necessarily implies a much more architectural approach to the plants.
With any architectural scheme, what I am interested in doing both metaphorically and, perhaps, literally is creating an armature that is specifically designed to accommodate at different times all these different kinds of planting or plantsmanship.

I am convinced this can be achieved by making flexibility a key element of the designers brief – building a question rather than the answer.

6. The Popes are unashamedly best at very complicated orchestration. Seeing the garden whole, or at a scale that goes beyond a few metres, requires a pretty sophisticated eye. Part of the game they play is to compound this by encouraging the impression of disorder, distracting the audience by the quality of the individual plants, and by constant experiment. But I also think that they are becoming more interested in broader and simpler planting, and in confounding the public expectation of the garden. The success of their collaboration with you will depend on how easily they can develop a vision of the many things this garden might be without their presence. My sense is that they are increasingly engaged with this idea.

To start things going, I have sent them a kind of questionnaire that tries to address some of the more technical aspects of the brief. I enclose a copy. I hope I will be able to let you have their notes in response to this before 10th October.

7. Gardening is as dominated by fashion as individual preference, and a good gardener is flexible in response to the architecture, which is less adaptable. The Popes have after all adapted their style to an unpromisingly rigid (from their point of view) layout. The avenue of straggly beeches at the bottom of the walled garden illustrates this, and something else – giving chance a chance.

It is now one of the most photographed features of the garden and provides the ideal habitat for the hostas which are grown underneath it. What really happened was that Nori and Sandra, on their arrival, found that nobody had clipped the beech hedge, and they decided to allow the trees to revert to their natural form, within the constraint of being planted so close together.

This is a delicious way of making our point about the fatuity of landscape architecture. Collaboration between serious gardeners and architects could work because both sides have something to learn.

8. Whether or not what happens inside the wall comes as a surprise, it should nevertheless be in extreme contrast to everything that happens outside. It is the focus of the whole ornamental landscape of the Estate.

To this end, as I said, I propose simplifying the planting outside, partly also with a view to reducing maintenance.

9. The current planting is exotic in the broadest sense. This exoticism needs to be carefully examined as a clue to something more fundamental. The Popes operate deep inside a natural and scientific system, using their knowledge as an impetus for a formal and aesthetic logic to planting that is very liberated, and unnatural. And they do this at a scale, and with a precision, which is in startling contrast to the wild disorder of their ‘finished’ product.

Their objective is to make a garden, not to grow plants; what they know multiplies the choices, not the constraints.

I feel this idea is an appeal to architects, and to you in particular.(For a start, it explains the failure of most green architecture- the discourse on sustainability is mostly aspiration, and certainly not advanced enough to produce good buildings).

From my point of view of course all this begins to take ‘landscape’ beyond intervention in nature, and, come to that, beyond imitation or commentary.

There hasn’t been a big idea in landscape design since Capability Brown; his approach was powerful and insidious because it fed the illusion that no intervention had taken place. Nature, landscape, and ‘landscape’ were a single literary and political fusion, itself inextricable from the English imperative of having one’s own plot. Modernism missed its chance at this- rather as it failed in the city; the theoretical apparatus was unable to deal with anything much that pre-existed on the site. If Corbusier is to be believed, the external world was made up of: a) buildings by Corbusier, b) buildings not by Corbusier, and, c) nature or, rather, ‘nature’. This last of single dimension, untouched by history or human hand. Possible honourable exceptions in landscape terms are Wright, particularly at Taliesin, and Mies, for the Wolf House.

10. I have explained the utility of the garden for the Estate.

The current 20,000 plus visitors per annum represent an asset which it is tempting for me to build on. The sensible way of doing this involves both a broadening of the range of products for sale – farm produce etc. - and an extension of the area of the Estate which is currently open to the paying public. Either way, the walled garden remains at centre-stage, and it seems logical to address this problem first.

11. In the case of Hadspen the landscape or the garden were significant, in different ways, in the late 17th Century, the late 18th Century, the early 20th Century, in the 1970’s when my mother opened it to the public, and now under the Popes regime.

As you have gathered, I like this constant reinvention- part palimpsest, part ruthless destruction. Over-writing is my pastime at Hadspen; the privileged understanding substitutes for pride of ownership, or feudality. Both of these last make me uneasy, and they restrict my preferred method of management, which I see as a sort of enlightened absenteeism.

The designer has to come directly to grips with the complexity of my position, without being distracted by the complex history itself, or by my current over-production of history on the site. There is, in other words, no possible refuge in historicism, and any intervention has to be legible and beautiful in its own right.

I hope this is challenge enough for both of you – if it is any comfort, I have never before arrived at such a clear formulation of the problem I present as a client in this place.

12. Some things that could happen:

a. The current plan is to extend the parkland area normally grazed by sheep to the top of the meadow where the library is. The library terrace would be fenced out, and the building would then sit in isolation. The parkland would come all the way to the south (straight) wall of the garden, or there might be a formal fenced walk along its outer length.

b. The Library may not remain a library forever; I have been toying with making it the tearoom, with a small new freestanding kitchen/servery building close by, or of its becoming a habitable retreat.

c. There is a masterplanning exercise to be done to reconcile access, entry sequence, ticketing, plant sales, loos, refreshments; I perversely want to delay this until we have an answer to the future of the Walled Garden.

d. It is certainly a possibility that the greenhouse and nursery area could be moved to the existing car park. This would clean up the curving outer wall of the garden on the north and east sides, but I have not yet worked out where we would put the cars.

e. None of the current planting or paths within the wall should be regarded as sacrosanct. I would even put a question mark over the five current entrances, and particularly over the two lowest ones, (the metal gate into the wood, and the tractor/catabatic opening at the south east corner); both of these last were made within my lifetime.

f. More broadly, there are no real constraints of site or scale- we could spill beyond the walls, or take the parkland into them. Even if they no longer existed, the walls would survive in memory (mine, at least) strongly enough to play within the palimpsest. I would hate to have to run this one with the Planning Officer.

13. Some more things that could happen, but you may well feel you want to ignore:

1. I am a bit wary of water - as not belonging historically, functionally or topologically within the walled area.

2. On the other hand, I had thought of making a series of irregular ponds, or at least something boggy and wet, in the shallow valley immediately in front of the library. It would be nice if the residual extension of this, represented by the fold in the ground at the bottom of the walled garden, was recovered. This is what makes me feel that the wide gap at the corner of the garden is in the wrong place.

3. I don’t, incidentally, see the need for a large open space of grass anywhere; we must see what Nori and Sandra think.

4. I have a strong, almost moral, preference for a formal solution that allows as much choice of route when moving through the walled garden area. A “processional” route in any case creates problems of wear, and the sense of derive makes the visitor far more charitable and curious.

5. As I said before, this preference for porosity does not extend to the doors and gates in the wall. At present they undermine the feeling of enclosure, and of secrecy- surely a given with a walled garden. There is, incidentally, a wonderful moment at (?) Levens when you enter a walled garden, but find yourself at first only in a completely empty grass corridor defined by the inside of the wall and a yew hedge that is too high to see over.

14. I am not sure if I have been dodging, or answering, the tough question you asked at the beginning: Do I want, in the Walled Garden, to build an Institution ? Here, at different scales, are four answers:

a. Personally, I try to have as little to do with Institutions as I possibly can. The instinct to make them seems on the whole corrupt; and they often work better if they remain incomprehensible, both to the players and the audience.

b. At Hadspen, my defence is that I am running a solipsistic laboratory experiment, with no defined end in view; in any case, the focus of the enquiry - mostly form and materials interacting with time or history - is not conducive to definitive answers. This may be pure fantasy on my part, but I am asserting here my right to believe in it.

c. All gardeners, in spite of themselves, do aspire to some extent to build an institution. To date, Nori and Sandra have avoided this trap more successfully than anybody - they make new plants and shuffle them around, make the most of seasonal change and are constantly experimenting in other ways.

But they are increasingly defeated by the expectation of their visitors in relation to their garden - change itself, not the capacity for change, has become the institution. It is time, I think, to give them a break.

d. I have heard too often that one has to wait a hundred years for a great landscape. Although it is easy to recognize the real problem this identifies, it is pretty frustrating since landscapes almost always do fail in time - plants grow and die, maintenance is undone, ideas are forgotten.

The good gardens, at least my favorite ones, are the ones that digest the action of time; actually, failing heroically in their aspiration to become Institutions.

What if we are conscious from the start of the force and inevitability of these processes?

Can we somehow dignify the failure, and skip the hundred years of waiting?