Niall Hobhouse to Kim Wilkie
What you have been saying exactly (and elegantly) demonstrates your point that the quality of discussion now should be what the project is about; with luck, it will make for a better garden in due course. You are very clear about the problems, and have also suggested all kinds of ways in which I need to clarify what has so far been posted on the web.
1.   The project, first and foremost, is an experiment; and one that will continue long after a gardener starts to garden again in the walled garden. It may yet fail, and for many different reasons including the ones you have pin-pointed. I just hope that doing things the ‘wrong’ way, certainly in the wrong order, might produce a surprising outcome.
2.   That said, there is a great danger that the over-structuring only makes more acute the problem that it was meant to address. The structure is an attempt only to clarify the Brief, and to slow down the process of design.
The walled garden at Hadspen is a fairly small and very well-defined site within two hundred acres of landscape, all gardened at different scales. I don’t ‘need’ a garden, not there, anyway not a boring one, and certainly not something that tries to conserve a previous moment or taste. Also, the economics of garden opening, as I have discovered, are finely balanced. Making any brief work with this much freedom requires a clear set of formal constraints - as provocative as can be.
To this end, I asked an architect with no experience of gardening to make a proposition for the site; it was important for me that the morphology of FOA’s best buildings suggest a strong interest in landscape. They have tried to isolate some functional practicalities of gardens and gardening, and to reapply this research to the site itself - taking both the lie of the land, and the wall itself, as unargued given. Some of this research does indeed feel very like going over old ground.
It was at this point a choice. Either go for a garden designer, asking him, or her, to overlay a design on a design, and raising all kinds of questions about how it would be executed. Or for a gardener/plantsperson who might be able to build a strong design logic at the right scale out of an understanding of plants and plant ecology. We chose the latter route because this seemed to offer the greatest scope for a new and unconstrained approach. This was, in their way and in that moment, rather what the Popes had set out to do seventeen years ago.
3.  Your point about selfish sensuality is the heart of a problem, and I appreciate very much your raising it as a general issue rather than (just) a real vulnerability in the approach I am taking at Hadspen.
I do believe absolutely in the duty of any good client to provide a lucid and fully resolved brief. The worst spin in this case would be to say that I have contrived to avoid answering the critical question of what pleasure I, as the client, want from my new garden.
But whose garden is it really? I’m arguing that good gardens have to belong to their gardeners, and that I was trying to give free rein to the ’selfish sensuality’ of the one who takes the job. The fact that it is a walled garden seems to encourage this; even as a vegetable garden in the 1960s I remember having to ask permission of my grandparents’ gardener to enter. I certainly felt latterly, and rather inevitably, that the number of visitors at Hadspen, and their responses, began to inform Nori and Sandra’s gardening. The spectre of Alnwick is one to be avoided at every turn - a ’show’ garden undermines very quickly the intensity of individual (sorry, selfish) gratification (sensuality?)
How about calling this whole thing an experiment in shared selfishness?
With many thanks again. Please don’t reply unless you feel you must.