You are wonderful to have tackled this, and so head-on (though I would have expected no less); I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the tact with which you tread the line between criticizing other people’s work -Â and your own intimate professional involvement in that landscape.

I need to think about all the questions you raise and respond con calma.

Before I do so can I ask did you manage to access the Foreign Office pdf on the website?

Too much of it is designed to show their workings, but it does provide an argument for why their strange device came out the way it did. And of course I recognize that unlike their ‘drivers’ - maintenance, drainage, movement etc - they weren’t trying (or didn’t succeed) in reducing history or culture to an elegant graphic formulation.

My cheap-shot defence at this point is that FOA have not provided a design, however much it might look like one, so much as an armature for discussion - as evidenced by your penetrating critique.

The contention is that it’s possible by a kind of ecorchement of the design process -including the isolation of such questions of what designers do, and what we want from gardens - that we can all participate.

All, in this context, to include past and future visitors, professionals, and me as the client.

A serious question - to which only you might have the answer: what would Mr Brown himself have said?

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