I don’t know quite what to make of these different responses. It seems that we are wrinkling a few brows. Silence would have been more painful. Interestingly, most of the criticisms seem to point to the brief being too dense of a document to make itself transparently known as a set of guides in the affairs of the gardener, who is required to bring great vision to this study. Garden-in-the-head and garden-in-the-flesh are certainly subjects not to be dismissed. Are they not both required to make a great garden? The great Parterres had their geometries and the Picturesque their surveyors. The parabola’s proposal is presently a method of looking at the problem.

I remember the interesting spatial experience of the walled garden when I visited; it was one of the main things that caught my attention: sometimes intimately interior, sometimes surprisingly expansive as you look into the distant landscape. The splines that suggest the flow of space are under-developed in the brief - the curve of the land, the curve of the wall, and the curve of the distant hills and topography. Stuart and I talked about how the intersections of the path network would provide points where these types of vantages are provided. And the switches in the scheme will allow the gardener the ability to choose/emphasize/obscure those types of experiences. We were always backing away from ‘defining’ the space (the gardener’s job with both structural plantings and herbaceous planting). The brief is intentionally a waiting background scaffold when it comes to garden programming.

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