Phew! I was beginning to worry that nobody was going to say it outright. You see completely why I need you to sort this out for me.

Having said all this, and a propos mess, my technique is to make as much of it as possible. Only then to pull in the lasso very fast.

Is this right?

God what a mess!

A mixture of laziness, zealotry, brown nosing, passive aggression and cattle blinders. At the very least, has nobody considered global warming and the possible obsolescence of the walled garden? (Yammer, yammer, yammer)

‘Smiling at the sound of an evening partridge’

PUKE

If I can help decode the mess, sure. But boy, what a crew of disasters. Landscape gardeners inhabit a universe of perpetual instability because they’re never sure if they’re considered as architects or florists.

Glad to be able to chuck a few more twigs onto your bonfire!

Yes, I can see that the FAO result is one of a method, a process. That the rigorous logic of their approach produces leaf-like results could be magical

I wonder if they feel rather miffed at the prospect of their work being
cluttered up? Something rather pared-down and elegant seems most compatible.

I am glad your wish-list (drama, mystery etc) suggests another set of priorities.

Of course I have been thinking more about your garden, and especially the embrace of the wall, the hill, the woodland. Thank you for the interesting correspondence. I like Raoul Bunschoten’s observation of the draped quality - that suggestion of the possibility of movement. These saw-tooth path sections, taking the walker up so close to the wall and away again… but how would it feel to be introduced directly to the wall? Possibly by the plants themselves? Even squeezed a little? I imagine the possibility of some secret place where the visitor could flatten their back against the wall.

The more I think about it, the more I feel this is the problem with the
FAO designs - their spikiness seems to me at odds with the embracing quality of the space - as though it’s trying to fight its way out.

Thank you again. Can I respond to your letter a bit in the abstract? I am truly fascinated by your very considered spatial response to the garden as intervened in by FOA. But my instinct is to let others take that discussion forward. Partly it is that the facilitor/client role I have taken seems to demand a disciplined discretion. It would be awful if anything I say now informs the imaginative response of the Competition entrants later.

Your explicit sequence: outrage - intrigue - then, engagement is just terrific.
Actually, I’d been hoping for more general outrage. Britishness, I assume. I am trying to persuade the people from Gardeners World that, for the first of their ‘thread’ of coverage (and if they do it) we should, if necessary, fabricate some articulate indignation.

At the very least the key idea is out: gardening is only ever about process, never closure (except in makeover-TV). Everybody who is interested in the Hadspen discussion now, and eventually every visitor who comes to the garden in the future, is emeshed in the designing of the space.

What flows from this is the present uneasy status of the FOA proposal within this process.
Any spatial representation - a drawing, say - needs to be treated with suspicion.
It is not that something along the lines of the current proposal won’t eventually be built. And it seems to be doing its job very well by licensing a radical imaginative response (some of it hostile) on the part of the - very broadly conceived - community of designers (i.e. anybody who is interested). It certainly had that effect for you.
The downside of this is that once any piece of paper exists an important freedom is undermined. In some sense, everybody then looks at it as though it is something already built. Professional designers generally, though not FOA I hope, are corrupt participants in this - it allows them to take control.
The test of what FOA have done is whether its ‘research’ approach allows it to adapt itself to the unfolding critique.

So I am juggling now, a bit feverishly. The proposal as it stands is … a provocation, a device, a graphic abstraction, a diagram, a mechanism, an armature, even; whatever, not, or not yet, a design. Would it interest you to have some more involvement in the assessment process as it unfolds?

Gist is really: that the FOA scheme is a device to provoke discussion more than a design- at least at this stage. On this basis, we are doing ok.

Against this, there is the problem, familiar to you and I, with any graphic representation by a designer - that it’s imagined as already built, and takes control. Architects, sometimes innocently but generally corruptly, draw too soon …….
The key is to make the most of their wonderful facility with the synthesis of ideas (it goes, I find, with spatial intelligence) - but to make them keep their hands in their pockets the meantime.

I really do regard FOA’s research-based approach as holding the potential for myriad other ‘formal’ possibilities.

It’s design practice, not just landscape-design practice, that I’m questioning here.

If it works - a big if -Â one could play the same games with the city, if there was ever time with those sorts of projects.

Re Kim’s thought - it’s presumptuous of me to comment further but I just thought he was arguing you needed to keep formal questions more open than their outline seems to provide - I mean questions of form as well as formal questions. That’s what your historian seems to be arguing too, if I take his drift.

Thanks. The encouragement from a fellow - but far more experienced - observer of process means a lot.
I wasn’t in truth so disturbed by Kim’s letter - like the Israeli Right, I felt that a few missiles on home territory would raise our game.

It is brilliant stuff - I love the correspondence…

Bravo - By the way I agree with him that Kim’s response wasn’t a rocket attack but supportive. It mustn’t be too restrictive if you want the vaulting ambition you aim for - and it may be on first glance that the diagramatic layout of walks already defines a lot.
Very very exciting

You are wonderful to have tackled this, and so head-on (though I would have expected no less); I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the tact with which you tread the line between criticizing other people’s work -Â and your own intimate professional involvement in that landscape.

I need to think about all the questions you raise and respond con calma.

Before I do so can I ask did you manage to access the Foreign Office pdf on the website?

Too much of it is designed to show their workings, but it does provide an argument for why their strange device came out the way it did. And of course I recognize that unlike their ‘drivers’ - maintenance, drainage, movement etc - they weren’t trying (or didn’t succeed) in reducing history or culture to an elegant graphic formulation.

My cheap-shot defence at this point is that FOA have not provided a design, however much it might look like one, so much as an armature for discussion - as evidenced by your penetrating critique.

The contention is that it’s possible by a kind of ecorchement of the design process -including the isolation of such questions of what designers do, and what we want from gardens - that we can all participate.

All, in this context, to include past and future visitors, professionals, and me as the client.

A serious question - to which only you might have the answer: what would Mr Brown himself have said?

I did have a look at your web-site, though I think I have only read the surface material, and the idea of breaking away from the Jekyllian mould of your mother and the Pope’s is an exciting and interesting one. As regards the design itself however, I find it very difficult to comment on other people’s work at this early stage, and in the case of the parabola I don’t feel I have sufficient grip on what is proposed - what you expect it to be like as an experience, what the effect of the planting will be, and so on.
What I can do is list the kind of questions I would ask, and that you have probably already asked, of the design.

1 There are views from the garden up to the surrounding ridge and (potentially) out into the parkland from the slip on that side. The first two questions that occur to me then are: is the design to be inward-looking (are the views out to be significant) and second are the views in important (is the whole geometry of the design to be seen from one or more points, and if so where exactly are these points, and what will be done to ensure that the garden is seen from them and only from them).
If the geometry is not perceptible either from within the garden or from outside it, and if it has no cultural resonance (it appears to be a purely mathematical construct), then I think one would have to wonder if it was worthwhile. In terms of relating to the outside, I would say that the most exciting approach would be to reopen the yew walk from the house, and to link the garden and walk into your library, and the two obvious view-points are the Settle, and the high ground east of the garden (particularly if such a view-point could be added to the Marl Pits loop).
2 If the geometry is to be seen in one go from outside the garden, then it will very much affect the height, style and massing of the planting, and I think that will have to be addressed in outline at an early stage - I get the idea of a lattice of paths holding down bulbous beds, rather like a geodesic design, but it could be that the designers want the planting to cut right across their geometry and pay no respect to it.
3 The geometry of walled gardens usually has a focal point (the junction of the two cross-paths); it is easy to think of other walled gardens that are polyfocal, with a series of spaces each with its own centre. This geometry has no focal point, it is what I would call a tessellated design. It has been tried in gardening, and it has had great successes (e.g. the ferme ornée, the idea of ‘garden rooms’), but it is not easy to bring off. If the walls at Hadspen really have the line of a parabola, then it will have a focal point (any line radiating from this point will ‘bounce’ off the curving walls in a line that is parallel to every other line; presumably all these lines will cross the straight arm of the D at a right angle).
4 It also has no cultural meaning (culture can be of any kind, paths laid out to get from A - B, to give easy access to every part of the garden, to conform to heaven-knows-what religious/scientific symbolism). This design is stripped of association, the paths are not tied in to the doors, and some of the access is decidedly circuitous. It starts therefore from profoundly un-English premises (English design tending to be empirically-based). This is probably what attracted you to it.
5 One shortcoming of tessellation is that the spaces that it generates tend to be similar. In this case there are some bigger beds, but these are so big that they may have to be broken up with hidden paths simply to allow them to be managed. In gardening terms there are no long vistas, no glades, no emptiness, no seats, but a maze-like series of paths each of which is the same width and of similar character to the next (even the two zig-zag sections appear to have the same dimensions). There will be other gardening challenges - for example it is always difficult to plant the acute angles of a bed which is surrounded by paths - people, particularly people with horticultural tractors, will tend to walk and drive across the corners. None of this makes the garden impossible, just a challenge.

As it happens I have written two articles about geometry and one (in fact the second of the two though for some reason it is to be published first) comes out in Garden History at the end of this month, I shall send you a copy. It might be interesting to put it up against your design.