A good moment to take stock of the series of exchanges since the launch of the website, now admirably bracketed - beginning and end - by your thoughts. We will put all this on the web at the weekend, and see where it takes us next.

Your letter is full of things to which I can readily and happily agree. Of the others, I think we can agree to differ because the issues involved probably don’t much matter, or not at this stage.

Here’s a brief defence of the approach that I’ve taken so far. I’d call it self conscious rather than super-rational.

1.   I, for one, have learnt a great deal, and much of it can go straight to the Brief for the planting competition.
For instance, I am now very interested in the general aspiration that a visitor’s experience should be, as close as possible, to that of a working gardener. And several powerful ideas have emerged through the correspondence, any one of which could be the germ of a planting proposal; to take just one from your letter, the possibility of using the path layout as a generator of an endlessly continuing sequence of ‘happy accidents’
I am now quite sure that the first submissions to the competition should be anonymous.

2.   Haven’t all the thoughtful and generous responses so far proved at least that the discussion itself was waiting to be had? And the range of backgrounds from which they come, and of approaches, is astonishing.
Everybody involved has, in some sense, become at once the designers, the visitors, the gardeners,and the owner of the Walled Garden.
I hate the idea of ‘participatory’ design when it is pushed at me as a bit of worthy architectural practice, but we should recognise that this is what we’ve all been doing.

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