Thank you very much. That is apart from expressions of outrage, the nicest thing is to have expressions of support in relation to this fractionally mad project. To answer your questions as best I can:

1. Any ruthless gardener will probably succeed in obliterating the hard surface if they choose within about 3 seasons.
2. You may have missed the download section on the site which contains the Foreign Office Scheme on tablets of stone. I am enchanted that, stripped of the ruthless logic of the research behind it, the path layout seems arbitrary. Just the sort of result that research should produce, but do see if it makes more sense with the calculations about path gradients etc.
3. And the banal answer to the parabola question is there too - the walled garden is laid out, for whatever reason historically or technically, in the form of a semi-parabola. Anyway, I VERY MUCH prefer your inference, and thank you for it.
4. Cedric is lurking there somewhere as well - I think absolutely at the bottom of the
Archive list, back in the spring of 2004. I’d love to hear what you thought of it.

The whole point of the Scheme is to make people want to apply; please do.

Touché, I admit, on the current state of the garden; it is very beautiful, and the rationalist (Mary’s word) in me can no longer think of this period simply as dead time between the Popes’ departure and the coming of the new order. It is still a garden, but the most ephemeral (and unsustainable) one that can be imagined.

As to incorporating these ideas into the brief, I feel you have done it for us!

I could dodge a bit by saying that it was already open enough for any aspirant gardener to do so himself/herself, but its much more important for this to be SAID - and I admit we didn’t.

Let’s see what people make of your comments; I can’t fault them

A few thoughts on the garden as it is - a garden with no gardeners.

There’s no question that the garden is a more hauntingly powerful place in its return to wilderness. It has become a vast, inhabitable Memento Mori - the skull behind the mask. The flowers literally overblown and shedding their petals.

The speed with which ‘art’ has been reclaimed by ‘nature’ is humbling, almost frightening. Between one week and another, whole paths are engulfed under aggressive and irrational growth. There’s a thrilling sense of trespass - trespass on a slightly sinister activity that happens when the back is turned, with the threat that an ankle could be encircled by a tendril….

There’s also been a shift of hierarchy between the visitor and the plants - flowers no longer seem to exist to be passively admired - they have a more aggressive, primitive presence. Almost confrontational. Conspiratorial. It’s their garden, not ours.

There is a very strong sense of the absence of gardeners - a sense of the garden having been liberated from the - necessary - control that created it. There’s also an irony in the reality of nature in contrast to the former careful, beautiful, simulation of it.

Different sections have become unrecognisable - carefully regimented domestic vegetables are replaced by a jungle of thistles in an almost spiky affront to cultivation/civilization.

Enchantment - the absence of other people makes the quiet pulse of life audible; the rustle of growth, the flickering of carp under peat-blackened water, the sucking of mulch; a sense of being watched…

I’m sure you have all kinds of sources; The Hypnerotomachia - seems an obvious one given the dream-like qualities of the garden as it is now. The pilgrimage. Shattered relics etc, etc
And the sublime and the beautiful. Burke, Kant et al - could just going back to the core of all those arguments somehow be interesting?

Burke’s ideas might apply more to the reactions to a radical rethink than to the product itself! All those nostalgists horrified by the sweeping away of the old garden.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.”

This is also you as Mary’s ’self-styled vandal’. Then there’s Kant’s idea that beauty is purposiveness without purpose, and that the sublime is a principle of disorder, of ‘purposive-less-ness’.

I’m not sure what that makes the FOA scheme…I guess it must be beautiful?

For your brief?
Enchantment / Reality
Purposive-less-ness / Purposive
Irrational / Controlled
Sublime / Beautiful
Private / Public
Past / Future
Nature / Art
Art / Science
Architecture / Theatre
Dream / Love / Strife…!

Maybe all these contradictions will keep the place unploughed for a few more months.

Anyway - it will be great. Memento Mori - Seize the day!

Think the nursery/management side should be set aside until we have a beautiful garden that people might want to see. Then there is a decision to make- based on the economics of the Estate, and the skills and sociability of the gardening team-as to whether indeed we reopen, at what level, and whether plant sales are appropriate.
Maintenance, or rather maintainability, of the garden is of course a consideration now, plus a complete openness about outcomes.

I’ve got in all right; dio mio, ma multo complicato! I’ve printed it all off and now have it next to my deck chair along with the August reading of “History of the Universe” and “Das Kapital”. So you are really looking for either two team(s) or a polymath with eight arms. I ought to have realised that. Am I right in thinking that the nursery/management side is not for our consideration?

Victoria G. forwarded your address, and I have been meaning to thank you for allowing our raid at Hadspen in November. We felt like two naughty mice and the experience proved most enjoyable, if a little elegiac. I picked up an ailing tray of Hemerocallis, which have bloomed the colour of a weighty Musar, and loads of Paeonia which will prove their worth next season.

I checked out the hadspenparabola.com. It is good to see some horticultural laundry being aired in public. It all seems spotless so far, and I like the transparent/egalitarian nature of the endeavour. Is the future incumbent to be bound by the proposed lay-out of the hard-surfacing? It seemed slightly arbitrary, like the position of a mihrab in the concentric rigor of a mosque. No bad thing, but I wanted to know why it is as it is, when I couldn’t see Mecca. Assumed ‘parabola’ implies the interference patterns left on the sand by the receding tide. No doubt the initial idea is far more oblique…
Good luck with it all.
PS I would love to see a copy of your article on Cedric Price. I thought his drawings were wonderful.

This is where we have got to: www.thehadspenparabola.com. Among many other things, it is a job advertisement. If you know anybody who knows anybody who might…….

But your commentary, please, as well.