My response to the correspondence is that I am astonished by it. This is all gardens-in-the-head, not about real gardens and still less about making a garden. Let them re-read Kipling’s ‘The Garden’? And how can anyone say there is no guilt involved? You cannot put your foot out of doors without saying to yourself ‘Oh my God, that needs pruning/feeding/mulching/ deadheading/cutting back/moving/removing/whatever and I should have done it before and don’t see how it’s going to get done this week.’ This is the sort of thing that one thinks about in the night. Plus whatever it is that one wants to do next, and how to do it. It’s all about process, it’s never over, never complete, never neither too thin or too crowded, except perhaps for three perfect days in late June about four years into the making of a garden. That on-goingness is the charm, and the mistakes, and the serendipities, and the cycles of growing and decaying. And why do I like doing this stuff? It’s a way of being outside and alone, legitimately, in a crowded life. It’s yes, selfishly sensual.
It’s also about control, and creating islands of order in a scarily uncontrollable world - all gardeners are closet authoritarians. Why is something that is not OK within a walled garden perfectly OK outside it? Because gardens are about creating thresholds - dangerous places always - between the tame and the wild, the framed and the unframed. And it’s a way of letting your thoughts work wordlessly through your fingers. But I do see that gardening is not what you guys are on about, so excuse me. But tell me again - what is it exactly that you are all on about?!

I have been thinking a lot about your letter to me, for which I remain very grateful.

On the Foreign Office ‘grid’:

a) It’s important to reiterate its VERY provisional nature as a spatial solution to the walled garden site.
b) I don’t think that I, of all people, should comment in much detail on the analysis that it has been getting.
My best role at the moment is to keep the discussion as ‘open’ as possible; in any case, an unguarded comment from me now might lead a competition entrant to infer the look of the garden I want, whereas my whole position is that I know I don’t know.

Nevertheless:

c) The importance of the views inwards and outwards were indeed part of the architect’s Brief.

Specifically, I agree with you that some very careful thought will need to be given to the views in. Armed with your letter, I have walked the existing paths outside, and examined the connection to the marl pit ‘loop’. We do need to be clearer about these opportunities as we refine the planting brief in the spring; probably I should ask you for a visit between now and then.

The views outwards are for whoever is doing the gardening to consider.

d) Your comments about tessellation, absence of allees, emptiness, etc, do perhaps assume something too specific about the nature of the possible planting style, or styles; and too little about the capacity of ruthless gardeners to ignore what doesn’t suit.

In relation to the first point, I hope that there is nothing about the path layout in itself that demands a pattern of (presumably herbaceous) island beds, floating between the paths. To quote from the ‘Manifesto’ ‘any planting style or diversity is fine as long as the garden can be maintained through the year, more or less, by one person.’

On ‘English’ empiricism (which you crystalize as an idea from the web correspondence):

1. A vigorous empiricism seems in the nature of any gardening activity. The best measure of this is how much more of Brown has survived than Le Notre, and survived as part of our instinctive understanding of landscape. Versailles or Chantilly will always feel at some level like the sets of a costume drama.

2. But empiricism doesn’t have to be in opposition to more theoretical approaches. It’s just that the insights of experience tend to accumulate as a dense overgrowth. It’s not simply that the insights themselves loose their individual force, but that it is often not clear any longer where one is going, or why one started. There are many gardens, particularly in England, that look this part. This is why I am uneasy with appeals to instinct, or with the value of ‘meanings’ that feel imposed.

3. As it happens, I think that Brown had a very clear theoretical programme; otherwise he would not have had the enormous success, and the following, that he did.

The catch for posterity, particularly in England, was that his ‘rigour’ was a look that looked as though no very radical designing had taken place

4. The connection between empiricism and Englishness is sometimes advanced as the reason why pre-war European modernism never really caught on.

It’s true that Modernists have in general made rotten gardeners. A theoretical position that dismisses anything pre-existing - history, cultural meaning, or the physical characteristics of site- is always going to make gardening something of an uphill struggle.

As a starting point for making a new sort of garden, I’d like to have reconciled these two opposed, and (as I see it) internally flawed, theoretical positions.

I doubt that the Walled Garden I want can be interesting unless we have tried.

A super-simplistic description of this process is to say that I’ve asked a very sophisticated architectural practice - who have already made their own critique of modernism- to advance a simple theoretical proposition.

The gardener then makes his own, entirely empirical, response to the new and unobstructed garden space.

Wont - can’t - comment, except to say how vivid you make it sound. And I have been waiting for time to come up in the general discussion.

So why not find a plant person who needs the job, and has no interest themselves in design; make a collaborative entry? In this age of job-sharing it might work.

OK agreed, spikiness not problem (wrong word) but characteristic. A rocking vessel, and a network of blood vessels? Some greedy parasitic thing, the clotting colours of old brick, engulfment, something trying to escape - hmmm….. The temporal issue is another wonderful angle. Experiments in plants notorious for growth rates. Cannot get shot of a particular fantasy - a whole grove of Mount Etna broom. Feel the idea of growth from seed to be especially apt in this test-tube situation. Wonder if it would be possible to engineer an element of azure delphiniums… (some trickery poss. required to retard flowering times - pinching?)..

Thank you for another lovely, stimulating, letter.

Largely, I need to do my maddening thing and not comment, but there are
Bits in yours where I am not going to be able to resist.

So, perhaps off the record:

The discipline of the FOA approach could as well provoke an oppositional response which is anything but ‘pared-down and elegant’. In any case, they know by now that I’m holding their feet to my bonfire, along with the garden designers. Also, the ‘drama’ prescription needs to be examined. Even in a garden, poetry doesn’t have to be pastoral; and surprises can be unpleasant, mysteries sinister.

Somebody who knows the landscape pretty well took me to a spot within the Walled Garden which he feels suggests a rocking vessel - as in cradle, ship, or liquid in a glass. Anyway, a comfortable instability, generated by the internal slopes, the curve of the walls, and the uncertainty as to whether the landscape outside was above the viewer in that spot, or below. So the paths could indeed be trying to escape the space, as you say; but equally, rather greedily or generously, trying to fill it. Hope this doesn’t sound like special pleading.

I will be sure to at least keep you in the loop with all this - tell us when we are driving you mad; and in the meantime thank you for thinking about it.