It looks rather nice without my tree !

Why do I find this image beautiful?

Hello, I have had a quick look, just finishing a new book right now so not TOO much time. Two questions: what is your connection with this project? Are you the owner of the property? And second, have I understood that what you want is a planting scheme? The layout, size, shape and even the PATHS have already been determined? How British it seems to me to equate planting with design but maybe I have misunderstood completely?

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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I can see that you are very deeply involved in this adventure and I certainly wish you well with it. As I said in the article in Vista however, I have had occasion to observe that for British gardeners, gardens are “about plants” whereas for French gardeners I think, oversimplifying a bit in both cases, gardens are more about space and sites, and I wonder how many young French designers would be willing to take on a project where the spaces, even the paths, are already given.� I’ve just finished writing a book with Gilles Clément who teaches at the school for Versailles, where he describes his workshops with students, and he forbids them to work out the paths before getting a sense of the site, biological and esthetic,� quite independently of practical constraints.� This is just one example.� You will see in the book on Chaumont, where the chapters are by theme, what some of the other approaches are, only one of six of those chapters is about plants.
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From a letter from Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse sent on the 1st September 2006

Nonetheless……..

Insofar as I have understood what is going on the website at all, I have perhaps sensed that in the ideas expressed there develops a dichotomy – which your manifesto may not resolve – between the claims (that are advanced for gardening) on the one hand by the scrupulous profession and on the other by the beloved pastime.

But might gardening not – and do not the best gardens demand precisely this? – also need representing by another perspective than that of the expert career or the inspired hobby – or even any combination of the two – namely, that of the searching vocation?

I find, for myself, in considering the meaning of gardens, it is impossible to dissociate myself from the immediate experience that, i.e., Victoria Glendinning so transparently describes, - or from the practised acumen of Johnny Phibbs – but most of all from what – for the total bearing of my life – Studley Royal, Ninfa, Ryoan-ji have meant – I mean the love and the responsibility I feel towards gardening – is inseparable from what such places have given me – whether by presence or by reputation – and the need to serve their urgent commission is paramount – and for their sake I deprecate and dread above all this abaissement du niveau mental (this shrinking of mental horizons) that inevitably occurs – and to which gardening is especially susceptible – when the high points, and more especially the deepest soundings, of space, as able to be represented in a garden, are marginalized, otherwise forgotten or glossed.
Modesty becomes the domestic plot, but need it altogether circumscribe the ambition of gardens – I do not mean as displays of power, in the way of Versailles, but as courageous experiments of the imagination…..

I rather feel what gardening needs is – absolutely – to get over its domestic agenda – I mean to be permitted once again to breathe those interviewing latitudes that severally haunt and re-appoint us – to a revision of prosaic dwelling – that is, in the most searching and discriminating way that is possible, to license, to demonstrate a poetics of milieu.

And granted (what, admittedly, is painstaking, and lacks) – namely – any congruous pitch of attentiveness, there is no reason why such revision should not be provoked equally as well in the back yard as in the most expansive acreage…It is unbearable for gardens to be so thoroughly complicit in that muffling – and myopia – of vision that neutralises the measure of meaning in requesting of spatiality it reveals to us – even such a little bit more – who we are, and what is here…..

Gardens, in every way possible, should test the companionability of space…..Why are even gardeners themselves so reluctant to accord the value of gardens the same expressive range and cultural importance as, for instance, buildings, or literature?

Is it because the private motive of gardening is so often a cerebral recantation (a retreat from all kinds of demanding brain-work)? An appeal to the unthinking, a pact with – not even – dissident pastoral, but – all too human – easy-going ‘nature’?

Can we allow, perhaps, that this ‘relief’ gardening is – indeed – precious – without, though, more serious ‘gratitude’ gardening – the gardening that seeks with all means at our disposal to repay our debt to what is given – being thereby neglected or traduced – for, truly, there are noble gardens – that more than humour – that erase – and re-explain us – and disconcert our literal world – and welcome us to unexampled precincts -

From a letter from Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse sent on the 13th August 2006

What – especially – I cannot remember of the ‘Parabola Garden’ is to what extent it combines – or will combine, once the beech allée is gone – the services of hub and vantage…ie I know it serves to protect - but how far also does it serve to face - the slope and the refusal to complete the oval argue a motive of further onlooking – but how intransigent is that wall at the base? – does the prospect over step it? – how do the new paths conform to, or defy, that decisive, or provisional finality?….

The shapes you have to deal with are anyway fascinating in themselves – the idea of a space defined by both cut-off and curvature! – to what extent does – will – the gathered spatiality veer towards its own inner life – or a leap - the patience of the squaring of the curved corner! (do you remember if Bachelard ever takes those two favourite loves of his together as a single amalgam? – I rather think he does – well, here would be a prototype!) but so, too, that final invasive abruptness – disallowing (Praeneste, Epidaurus) the logic of scenic or theatrical spectacle!

This unexpectedness - so tender, so harbouring an expectation – so sudden – so almost – snubbing a finale (“let be be finale of seem”?!) well fits with what little impression I have formed of Hadspen through my (propitiously?) disjunctive visits (tea with your father and Jeannie on a terrace - extensive perambulations with Jeannie as sympathetic Cicerone – quarantined forays into the walled garden) namely – that – under your stewardship – a startling dialogue seems to be emerging between (can I say?) the ancestral and the disinherited conscience – the residual and the contemporary ways of being in the world……

Perhaps already in the eighteenth century intimations – if not of ‘unbelonging’ then of greatly stretched belonging – arose as one bestrode the ridges and the counties multiplied…. today it is impossible not to feel a tension between the harmonious latitudes attendant on the dwelling – v the approaches to a panoramic sublime on the heights – as if the measure of place itself became untenable when lifted to the illocality of free-ranging space. (Not only Bachelard and the poets, but also the best of the geographers – never art historians in my experience! - have deliberated such a relation: Yi Fu Tuan, for instance, wrote an illuminating book developing the dialectic between space and place).

I felt, while walking with Jeannie, your placing of an airy vertical sculpture down on the meadow adjoining the house was somehow striving to instil into the domestic levels an anticipatory disconcerting vastness…I am the last person who wishes to diminish the achievement of the eighteenth century –

I idolise those eloquent and floating aprons of lawn permitting access to far-smiling acres – or – a rebours – obediently forgetting themselves for the sake of their ‘frontispiece’ – as Palladio liked to title the façade of the house – that invention of a grateful latitude is the proper compensation of dwelling – privileged – lethal – (to huddles) – it may be – but who will imagine a default of poetry is such fresh license granted space? (with perhaps the potential of a spatial erasure of place already latent?)
The question, for us, becomes the new catechising of that licence – the dispossessing of the assured entitlement – the suit of a gratitude – incredulous – tremulous – for not always easy – disowning – expanse – Would this be the case of the ‘open’ at Hadpsen – its folding back into the domestic – the ancestral – register a sharper, more endangered configuration of serenity?

So, to return to the parabola garden, one then sees perhaps, why from our point of view, as well as theirs, it is still suited to being a dislocated hub for now just remains this discreet abeyance (of a pivotal outdoor foyer) from the societal routines of the house –

On the face of it, I like the inlay of the FOA path lattice – amongst other things, it seems to organise the asymmetry of the slope, and bring it to rest on a rather Gaudiesque footing (didn’t Gaudi, if I remember, fetishize the parabola?) I seem to recall a dramatic cross view, on the axis of the beech allée, to a steep, wooded hillside? A purely visual, supra-mural focus that did not physically disturb the interior space has perhaps the gesture expecting one day its announcement here (or was there perhaps something already in place?)

There is a rather seductive non-conformity between the aspects of geometry and gradience in the walled garden – even, the deployment of the path lattice has got to work with a series of bristling chasses-croises.

Not only the somewhat frenetic networking of the lattice – but also its non-deference to a centre – is so Hermetic! (Hermes alone of gods disliked the self importance of a sphere of influence, eschewing any personal power-base). I can’t but on my own terms of reference see this energetic pattern of paths – pent up, impatient with its formal confinement – as inscribing Hermes’ love of testing the boundaries, into the (indispensable) Hestian provision that sine qua non of courage – of the vessel of containment….(ancestral belonging and contemporary disinheritance combining ‘in loving strife ‘ … again?)

Should all the central lozenges be planted?

Will there be preserved a haunt of emptiness running through the design to prefigure the elsewhere – majestic – open? So to bear down on us availability, responsibility to Bachelard’s ‘intimate immensity?–

In any case – what a stimulating project!

Everything said here I shall probably want to discard at once when I revisit the site! What does haunt me though – is that the direction taken by the parabola garden – whatever it may be – might not be – from your point of view – an isolated project – the site is too pivotal, and too precious – not to need that it both absorb and anticipate your reading of the legend of Hadpsen as a whole – (whatever that may be!). As we said of .. , it is a pity there that here is no real sense of companionship between its various spaces – no legend of their necessary spatial congruity – the further image steps out of the FOA plan of the garden its being the hive of the quest for connection. I long was nourished by the manner of the greeting of the house – so judiciously honey – on its hill –

I thought you might like to see this for the path layout; “the bottom of the mind is paved with cross-roads” (Valery).

Congratulations upon your fascinating challenge to the world of gardening, a challenge sorely needed.�

Most gardens, it seems, are designed in late Victorian mode, or worse. Their planning is mindlessly uncreative, oblivious to the changes - for better or worse� - in all other artistic modes.�

Of course, your letter inspires a good many early-AM-follies, such as a� greenpeace Jackson Pollockian hotchpotch, planted entirely with strains of maryjewwanna, or - a less lucrative one - composed� only of weeds.
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ps: my proposal for the parabola garden is to build,� a white concrete� wall, to� project (silent) films on, it would be magical …
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