lovely to see you; and thank you for your sharp observations. Teresa will send you the Cedric piece later this pm(not on this machine). Meantime here is my list of gardens; I was wrong - Sissinghurst and Hidcote are there, (and 2x Lutyens). We rejected this approach altogether in the end, but the note gives a flavour of the to-and-fro that went on with FOA for six months before they came out with anything like a drawing. It occurs to me to say, perhaps wishfully and probably unhelpfully, that the answer in my case to the rationalist/romantic conundrum should be BOTH.

That is people from either school of thought would probably achieve some concensus about most of the gardens on my list; you and I did, for instance. So the questions become: how do great gardens do this? Can we assume that this is why they are great? If so, can one do anything to create the preconditions for them- in this case, by front-loading some of the ideas? I freely admit that ideas are my comfort-zone. I changed the manifesto, incidentally, to include drama:-mystery, surprise, poetry. Above all, an experiment.

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