Yes, I am the owner of the place; there is no garden yet.
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The competition process is an exercise in discovering, if possible, how memorable and exciting gardens might come into being. Even this question is not simple, since it’s clear from the correspondence already on the website that gardens and gardening are valued in different ways, and that the same garden means a different thing to different people.
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However, there is a consensus that we do all appreciate sharing in the imaginative intensity, and the engagement, of a gardener in his or her own garden. So the first assumption of the competition is that the new gardener will assume effective ownership of the space within the wall; the second is that they will be gardening principally for themselves, and not for a public. When visitors are allowed in I am happy, as the ‘legal’ owner, to be just first-amongst-equals.
The other question is a much bigger one, and the answer is probably best found by looking at the article from BD on the website (under Media Coverage), and at the pdfs of the Foreign Office project - which show how it was developed from an analysis of the climate, topography and architectonics of the site.
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As I see it, the nub of this is expressed in the Manifesto (again on the site). Gardens are generally made up of plants, but the link between them, both in the literature and on the ground, seems to be ever more fuzzy.

On the one hand, professional designers very often don’t know their plants, and certainly are never responsible for making them grow. On the other, the plantsman gardener rarely designs, or doesn’t design very well; this is in spite of the fact that a knowledge of plants, plant ecologies, and of the site all provide a powerful logical tool with which to do so.
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In this context, the FOA paths are really the platform that encourages the planting designer to work at the whole scale of the Hadspen site.
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I had hoped this was all fairly UNbritish, which is why I need your help.
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Many thanks for looking at it.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Correspondence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.