I have enjoyed the email banter and thanks for your more serious letter too.
As I said, I really like the fresh energy of your approach to the project and I am sure that you will come up with something that is beautiful and original. It is also a relief that you are avoiding the Alnwick spectre and realistic about the fickleness of public opening.
You have, of course, got me thinking about gardens - and provocation certainly seems to be part of your agenda.
I suspect that, contrary to popular grumbles, we do live most of our lives collectively and publicly rather than in individual isolation. The moments of being completely aware of self and the possibilities of being consciously alone with a place are actually rather rare and special.
Most of my work deals with the public realm or places that are not really private. The role of a designer/mediator is pretty clear there.
Gardens are different and it is necessary to think carefully about where a designer fits in all that. Gardens are a private world and, at their most vivid, feel like a marriage between a place and a person - with all the bickering and disagreements as well as the moments of magic. In larger gardens that marriage is often between the gardener and the garden, with the owner as a kind of in-law onlooker. That can work but has tensions. Sissinghurst may be suffering a little from that now. To stretch the analogy, perhaps the designer is a kind of marriage guidance counsellor - listening to owner and garden in turn and then helping them to talk to one another, with the gardener as benevolent housekeeper.
So where does that leave you? I sense that you are more comfortable sitting on the edge and provoking dialogue. That will certainly be interesting and will encourage some good intellectual discussion. It should also produce some stimulating new shapes and patterns.
But deep down I would miss that personal engagement between you and the garden. Maybe that is where the truly radical rethinking can happen? Perhaps the solution is a ménage a trois: you, the garden and the gardener?

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