Just back from giving a talk to graduating students at Kew - I spoke about Happiness in the garden and somehow, inspite of all that ‘intellectualising’ of the meaning of a garden, reminding them to retain an instinctive reaction to beauty .The garden is where you live life to the fullest - who said that ? Happiness is a state of mind realised in the garden by observing, preserving and nurturing as when ‘the gardener tends the growth which ripens into fruit’ .
 
‘The garden offers one of the most innocent delights in human life; it is also a reflection of a virtuous habit of mind.’  Another quote
 
All this may be better than the ‘meaning’ and ‘function’ of your walled garden.
 
My trouble is that I want a walled garden to be separate from LIFE - my refuge
 
 I think YOU, Niall, miss out on a lot by not digging, mulching, pruning …..all the tasks which Victoria G. enjoys!  You may embark on a discovery of this new world one day - it is where I began.  
 
 I always mean to ask you if you still have a frisson of excitement from a beautiful painting - or do you only see it for its value?
 
 

Fascinating though the conversation between Glendinning and Hobhouse is, I don’t get the feeling that either of them has really considered their position. They are making old arguments, and is that the best way to go into a new project? The whole design v plantsmanship contest is old hat, and was artificial in the first place, in much the same way as the spurious division between art and science. If he really wants to do something he’ll have to leave behind the old christian ideas of dichotomy, and enter the more difficult and rewarding zone of duality, plurality and uncertainty. He needs to let go.
Very funny though, that he thought he might find the radical by looking outside the professional gardening world. Amateur gardeners are the most conservative creatures on earth, artists and writers or not. They will not plump for his blind Peruvian in a million years.