From John Hubbard:

‘About Kim’s points: you will have noted my overlap of ideas with his. As for selfishness.,.. I should just be as selfishly or unselfishly sensual as you feel. That should make for a happy life and only necessitates keeping guilt at bay. Guilt is the true enemy.’

So, gardens as places for not feeling guilty. Like Kinglake’s inscription in his Bible:- Important, if true.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sit well with any Modernist rationale; and it rather skewers current approaches to landscaping the public realm (particularly the preoccupation with security). Not to mention my efforts to be radical on my own patch.

Who was it who said: we should keep in mind that everything began when we were thrown out of a garden?

Absolutely wasn’t meant to be a rocket attack - much more applause for a great project and encouragement for you to be much more personally involved. Gardens really need that spark between a place and a person. They should be about pleasure and wonder and reflection - not too distant and academic. The designer and gardener are there to help and mediate, but the buzz is from the land and the land lover.

Now, Mary and I in a garden together is another subject…

Good luck with it all

Am working on a kind of apologia in response to Kim’s rocket attack of last night, but in the meantime I have to ask: are either of you to be trusted in a garden - perhaps M particularly, but certainly together?

And to observe: all this from the mouths of two of our most distinguished garden designers; the sensual selfishness you each, deliciously, identify doesn’t seem to me exactly to need a garden; let alone a designer.

What’s up?

Now Mary, how revealing!
Amidst selfish sensuality, I would count things like smiling at the sound of an evening partridge, feeling the pattern of dappled shade on your skin and smelling summer soil after rain. I meant the phrase as an honest, private and unguarded sense of oneself as part of the magical private outdoor world of your own garden. Gardens above all are where you can think most simply about your place in the world, your vegetable-animal-mineral-spiritual content and the sheer pleasure of being alive and intimately connected to a small corner of land with growing and decaying companions.

I think the whole Renaissance Villa movement was based on this idea of clarity of thought through working with land and plants - the straightforward simplicity of Arcadia and the Augustan poets. Didn’t quite have cats, cream and wafers in mind!

Clever, Kim, Id say, but I would not be pleased to meet someone whose visage and demeanour reflected the sensual satisfaction and wonder they’d just derived from anything. Selfish sensuality is fine but not if it means a public display of private pleasure, which usually indicates a cross between a cat that’s swallowed the cream, after-sex face and the post Holy Communion one. Make everyone write down something to suggest what gardens mean to them. Mine probably - escape from everyday, connecting to a universal time cycle, private world, chance to do something selfish/sensual. Being outside makes me feel better and calmer. Quite interesting that we asked Telegraph readers to nominate their favourite gardens and they all chose something different. No consensus. We may end up with only 2 or 3 the same. This is not a reasoned reply just quick thoughts. Longing to see what serious thinkers suggest.

The parabola wall is a beautiful structure. It is both a clear and geometrical form and yet it is ‘draped’ gently over the slightly irregular hillside. The garden inside will primarily be introvert, so I do not think the need for the FOA scheme to react to any views is very great. The planting scheme can more indirectly react to the views, so that along the pathways unexpectedly views can open up between the plants towards the outside landscape. The FOA scheme is like a net stretched from the parabolic wall, creating with its bifurcating pathways fields for different planting programmes. Currently the garden covers almost completely the wall on the inside. The points of the pathways in the new scheme enable the wall to remain visible, and indeed touchable at various points, so keeping a tangible relationship between the garden and this beautiful object.

Why is sensuality selfish? Any more than joyfulness? If private delight is made apparent, then it could not be more generous. Wouldn’t you be pleased to meet someone whose visage and demeanor reflected the sensual satisfaction and wonder they’d just derived from luxuriating alone in a garden they’d made and love?

I’m thrilled with this, particularly if it suggests the quality of the discussion we could be having.

I of course dread having to express myself on the subject of selfish sensuality. What do you think?

Mary Keen had shown me your ideas for Hadspen and I really like the questioning energy of your approach.

After the first enthusiasm for what you want to do, I began to wonder if the process might be a little too structured. The fluid creativity between owner, designer and gardener might be rather stifled by being compartmentalized. There needs to be a continuing ricochet between all three and the place itself. There are moments of magic when a place makes its own demands and we all manage to listen. Perhaps a bit hippy romantic, but instinct and intuition have a powerful role.
Some of the FAO analysis seemed a little laborious and simply part of the automatic process that a designer should always go through. And I also wonder if the self-conscious link to the other arts might be a little strained. Alexander Pope insisted that a garden should encompass these as a matter of course.

The discussion you are stirring up may be even more valuable than the garden itself. I wonder if you might provoke it to step back even further and begin with the point of a garden altogether. Why do we do it and what direction should we be looking in now? Patterns are interesting and plants are wonderful, but it might be much more interesting to start with what you yourself want from a garden. I would trust selfish sensuality in this more than abstracted speculation.

I read your piece on Cedric with keen interest. It is a clearly written and intensely funny narrative. It seems the folly came at a Price, but the errant architect is right about valuing the intensity of the first impulse; rarely does anything of merit emerge without conviction, accompanied by the bald-eyed ‘interrogation’ necessary to carry it through. How strange he appeared to shy at the jump.  Was it a form of indolence? Or was it that debilitating intelligence that allows too many options to be seen. I guess we are always 25 years too late.

What is taste?

I loved the reference to Borodino, perfectly apt.

Your description of the project reminded me of a palimpsest, the constant visions and revisions caught in ghostly aspic, curling at the edges over time. I would love to see such drawings as exist.

I have tried to download the pdf file of the Foreign Office scheme several times, but a message bounces back that the file is damaged. I assume this is an error on the website. Is there another way of obtaining a copy? I have no problem with ‘arbitrary’, but I like to know how it was achieved.

In the meantime I shall endeavour to learn the supercilious method of conveying an idea. How wonderful for a raised eyebrow to express a whole concept. Unfortunately, not being a bloke, I have never found the necessary facial muscles. It could take some time.