I have just finished reading Mary Keen’s recent article in the Telegraph - swiftly followed by a look through your website - and thought I would send you my (probably incoherent) initial thoughts.

First, outrage. Then, intrigued….

I have visited Hadspen just once, in the summer of 2004, and it remains with me. Not particularly the gorgeous planting itself, but the extraordinary sense of place - that rather disturbing feeling that I was revisiting somewhere I knew of old.

The memory of moving through the spaces is particularly strong - the very theatrical walk along the top of the carp pond, entering the walled garden (from the Western doorway) and that sense of anticipation. So I smiled at the “lack of structure” appearing as a weakness in the very thorough SWOT analysis!

The actual spectrum walk around the inside of the parabola wall I remember as a feeling of gluttony, of almost careering down the quickening slope. Through the avenue of trees then back uphill through the yellows, past that big empty yellow pot, a feeling of elation.

It seems that the FOA design is aimed, likewise, at creating a space very much to move through (not sit down!), and to maximise the viewers
Appreciation of the planting in as dynamic a fashion as possible - especially the logic leading to the saw-tooth path sections.

I appreciate that the imposed 1:20 “comfort gradient” is the very source of the design. But I keep trying to imagine the experience, how it will affect the sense of place. To walk directly along the curve of the gradient (like sheep - the tracks they leave along hill sides) is fine and comfortable. To walk across (i.e. straight up or down) seems to me more instinctive than to cut diagonally, I think. This characteristic could I am sure be harnessed. The walker will chose, and will sometimes (surely) dare to break the rules, stride across or even through. Would the zig-zag route make its walker feel manipulated, even foolish? It may be interesting to feel foiled, led a dance. The theme of temptation might be particularly apt in the context of a produce garden…(which is also rather womb-like!…another whole set of ideas there)

What about these points - road blocks? Or areas simply becoming impassable
as growth progresses? Does this garden have a lifespan envisaged - can it be planned to close in on itself in an active engulfing way?

It strikes me you have an amazing retail opportunity too. Hadspen surely means colour - and this, together with the public’s appetite for the “potting shed” image, would surely create a potent internet brand. If you were interested - happen?

Thank you for your nice formal letter, and the considered response. The FOA scheme may yet prove too arbitrary in fact; I am encouraging everybody to think of it not as a design, or even yet a formal proposition. But what … an armature, a scaffolding? Whatever it is, it isn’t ready for plants yet.

The whole thing is certainly done on the assumption that a ruthless gardener will have all those swooping curves obliterated well within the term of any employment contract.

The Benjamin passage is a wonder, and thank you.

Thank you for arranging for the pdf to be forwarded. It is a redoubtable piece of research which makes sense of the proposal, and expresses a measured response. It no longer appears arbitrary. And the sense of the trite definition of parabolic interference is not lost. It may prove useful for the hordes who will visit the garden.

Pondering your piece on Cedric at greater length, the encounter reminds me of the Passagen by Walter Benjamin. Indeed this extraordinary work could be taken as a starting point for any planting scheme, ‘World exhibitions are places or pilgrimage to the commodity of fetish…’ Or ‘It is not what is past that casts it light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.’ It seems clear he was unable to still his mind enough to make sense of the endeavour, and yet, and yet. There were storm clouds looming. Gawd knows how to pick one’s way through this massive text. To quote from the current Foreword, ‘Did (Benjamin) leave behind anything more than a large scale plan or prospectus? No…The Arcades Project is just that: the blueprint for an unimaginably massive and labyrinthine architecture…’ The play’s the thing. Would Cedric Price have approved?

Thanks for this, and for your encouragement about the project. I’m also full of complicated regret about the passing of the Pope’s planting … which is why I’m keen to distribute some of their achievement to anybody who feels strongly enough about what they did … Also the garden in its present state is now so much the property of its plants, and this is beautiful. I’d prefer it if you confined the take to the walled ‘D’ area, but if there is something by the pond you have to have then go ahead. Many years from now we hope to be able to ask you for some cuttings.

As a fairly conventional gardener I enjoyed many happy visits to the Pope’s Hadspen. I felt they achieved their objectives superbly…

I think your ‘first principles’ approach to the new ‘parabola’ is very interesting and enterprising and I look forward to the results … hopefully in the not too distant future.

In the meantime I wonder if I’m reading too much into the Telegraph article somebody passed on to me? Can I really turn up with a wheelbarrow and spade and dig up plants that you are otherwise going to shortly plough into the ground … PLEASE TELL ME I’M NOT DREAMING!!

Avante gardening and Trellis formation philosophy:

If the FOA paths system is made from (extracted, refined and recombined)
non-living materials (and also, ideally, if it has water or other infrastructure in it),
Then from the vantage point of the moon- because the path system will be
obscured by the plants as their growth cycles open and close the circuits -
the FOA path system is an interior trellis and not an outside framework or a
plan.

It therefore models the highest formation of the extracted, refined, and
recombined materialism of modernity: to serve as the trellis which supports
the elaboration of the next materialism: The materialism of gardening
multiple contingent growth logics.

Also in this section: Avante gardening along analogy maps between nested
absolute scales of economy “….as the DNA is a non-living syntactical trellis - supporting the outward elaboration of the organ garden of the body…” and also The Bridge vs The
Trellis as meta-formations of modernity.

Was very tempted by Kim’s last arch reply, and the discussion of yesterday, to remind him of: ….the book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden … and it ends with Revelations. (Wilde?)

You are all quite right to hammer me on over-intellectualisation. The consensus against it is very powerful, but I do wonder if old Goethe wasn’t wrapping something sharp and uncomfortable in his suave generalization.

One possible defense is that there is, or there can be, a time for ideas and a time for instinct. I do spend the three non-art-dealing days doing the following: stage-managing the way in which architecture is taught, commissioning buildings, planting trees, and collecting architectural drawings. The process of design has become my special subject, although this doesn’t have to mean that I get it right on the ground.

In relation to the LSE Urbanism at least, I think I have learnt two things - that experimental process can often uncover good new design forms, and that you can’t do anything good in the city without an analytic understanding of the way in which a building will work - both in the context of its neighbours, and for the people who use it.
My worry over the walled garden project is not a surfeit of ideas per se, but that the ideas may not be good ones, or even right for the purpose. Of course the FOA analysis is a bit vieux jeux; but it is their capacity to synthesise different strands of research that interests me at the moment. I doubt that we will build the current version of their plans; it is just that there are a thousand other configurations implicit in their approach.
When something exciting emerges we will all recognize it, and by instinct.

So the unaddressed issue is perhaps that none of us, in our very different ways, are yet convinced by what’s on paper now. There’s a long way to go.

Desktop gardening - THE new pursuit.

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?

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.

Right there with John Hubbard. Selfish in terms of being for the self with none of the moral subtext. Absolutely no place for guilt - I agree.
The public realm is another thing altogether. A garden is for private creativity - as radical as you choose. Public space needs to work with many other lives, issues, ideals and practicalities. Interesting overlap though, where the private space can contribute to the public good.