As it happens your email ‘found’ me this afternoon wandering around Petra with my son.
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 Petra is very relevant to the discussion we are having. It’s not just that I’m there now; I think it passes any test that I could apply to a contemporary designed landscape.
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Over several hundred years the Nabateans made a visually coherent sequence of rock-cut monuments, using the vertical sides of the gorges in the Shara Mountains.
The head of their pantheon was Dushara, ‘he-of-the-Shara’. All the gods resided in the rocks themselves- were the rocks, in fact; an intervention in the natural landscape was only for their glory.
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So the ‘designers’ of Petra saw an altar as a solid stone that was an apt physical medium for worship; they carved free standing cubes -twenty metres high and without ornament or opening- as god-blocks, and obelisks as representations of beams of light striking the earth ( I find this particular idea quite wonderful).From the cliff-faces they excavated monumental facades, indetirminately temples or tombs, perhaps both- but all with no interiors to speak of.Â
Their man-made lanscape was a beautiful integration of ideas, forms, and material. It gives revived meaning to ‘genius of place’
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 You don’t have to believe in gods, still less in gods-in-rocks, to find Petra powerful. In fact the ideas emerged from scholarship a hundred years after Petra had become part of the mythology of European landscape; so knowing them isn’t important in itself, and may well be a distraction.
At this remove, it also doesn’t much matter which came first, the Gods or the rocks; if I’d been around here in the second century BC, I would certainly have felt that the rocks were there to be worshipped.
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Of course we don’t know whether they gardened in Petra. Since gardens are always a sort of commentary on culturally-received ideas about nature, it feels unlikely that the Nabateans felt they needed to do any more of this.
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With my own garden -which has always been a garden- it seemed to make sense that the comments be made with plants; making a virtue of their naturalness, so to speak. (This isn’t facetious; I am just not a Martha Schwartz fan).
Choosing a plant and putting it in a particular place seem together the actions which, in repetition, make a garden. I thought it would be nice to start my quest for a designer with people who know about plants; they would at least know where to put them so they would grow.
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But it is going to be tricky finding someone who has ideas as shapely and internally convincing as those old Nabateans, so I may have to cast my net wider.
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 I was slightly reassured to discover that ‘nature’ for Raymond Williams has the most complex set of meanings of any word in the language. Perhaps the general problem with gardening these days is that nature is mostly used-up, or is plain unresponsive to new meanings. So the garden can now only really comment on it’s own history, and to make a good one you need to know either a very great deal, or nothing at all (and in both cases, surely to be asking something pretty impossible of that visitor of yours)
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Unfortunately I fall into neither category, having by now stretched naivety beyond credible limits.
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Do you know Michael Pollan’s Second Nature? It was a wonderful addition to the theoretical literature of gardening.
To the shame of all of us he, like Noel, has lately become much more interested in the ethics of food production.
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Where do good gardeners go when they die?
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 4:45 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.