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’ .
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‘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
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All this may be better than the ‘meaning’ and ‘function’ of your walled garden.
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My trouble is that I want a walled garden to be separate from LIFE - my refuge
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� 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.� �
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� 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?
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Your other correspondents (especially ‘Johnny’) have very efficiently covered the theoretical ground re: the Parabola.

At this stage placing the walled garden (WG) in a sensitive, unrigid relation to the rest of the property would be my concern. The problem is trying to place a fine large but awkward object into a scheme that has been altered over the years by various people, so that it relates to other objects and spaces, but retains it’s peculiar impact without impeding the ‘flow’.

One way of doing this (and knowing what a keen tree planter you are) might be to frame the WG with a fluid and varied surround of trees weaving them alternately inside and outside of the walls, veering them off the walls at strategic points toward the house, ponds, exits etc. using them as freewheeling allèes which both tie the WG to the rest and subtly function as direction signs. One might use fruit trees for example inside the WG and whatever the gardener elect sees fit elsewhere.

As to the WG itself, the design produced by FOA might if very well maintained (see ‘Johnny’), and seen from above be interesting, but I would endorse the view that walking through the maze of paths at ground level could be irritating and disorganizing. I would suggest that the paths be made much broader, the beds less acutely shaped, and leveled, scalloping them into the slope with stonewalls in a kind of terracing effect. This would relieve the flatness of the design and, so to speak aerate it, as well as offering interesting planting opportunities.

It is very useful to have your comments, not least as a reminder of the idea we had at the beginning that the path pattern was only ever intended as a kind of scaffolding. I really could not be happier with the job it has done so far; and there are plenty of people out there who are less interested in the theoretical discussion, but already working on actual
planting ideas.

As I mentioned I am conflicted.
What is� a garden? Inevitably all gardens are a form of artifice. And in Britain barely a blade of grass does not bear man’s smudge. One of my favourite landscapes is the Mojave Desert, the place evinced no cultural meaning in terms of the Western model. Of course the Paiute Indians would have had another dialectic, mapping their world via a network of natural cisterns, the intimate geometry of which protected the precious commodity of water against the process of evaporation. People get drowned in the desert, there are flash-floods where the parched surface is unable to take up the water. Cars get tumbled, which is unimaginable when standing on the rough ground of caliche. And the plant life is extraordinarily varied: Atriplex, which I can only describe as Bruegel-green (with a bit of bling) secretes salt crystals onto the surface of its leaves, to act as tiny reflecters against the brutal sun. Pinyon and creosote bushes, thorn-apple, and Joshua trees all clutch at life. There are strange, brittle ferns unfurling in the deep shade, while up high, where the air thins, a tonsure of pine fringes the mountains. And in spring the desert bursts into bloom, if there has been sufficient rain, if not the seeds can lie dormant for years. To the gardener, seeing plants express their peculiar adaptations is one of the great pleasures of travelling. And what have the Las Vegans done in their gardens? They have planted lawns and roses, and spawned a plague of golf courses, as if they were anywhere on earth but a desert. At Hadspen, is the proposed geometry, particular enough to the site? Will it be understood? Is that important? What is a garden?

A good moment to take stock of the series of exchanges since the launch of the website, now admirably bracketed - beginning and end - by your thoughts. We will put all this on the web at the weekend, and see where it takes us next.

Your letter is full of things to which I can readily and happily agree. Of the others, I think we can agree to differ because the issues involved probably don’t much matter, or not at this stage.

Here’s a brief defence of the approach that I’ve taken so far. I’d call it self conscious rather than super-rational.

1.� � � I, for one, have learnt a great deal, and much of it can go straight to the Brief for the planting competition.
For instance, I am now very interested in the general aspiration that a visitor’s experience should be, as close as possible, to that of a working gardener. And several powerful ideas have emerged through the correspondence, any one of which could be the germ of a planting proposal; to take� just one from your letter, the possibility of using the path layout as a generator of an endlessly continuing sequence of ‘happy accidents’
I am now quite sure that the first submissions to the competition should be anonymous.

2.� � � Haven’t all the thoughtful and generous responses so far proved at least that the discussion itself was waiting to be had? And the range of backgrounds� from which they come, and of approaches, is astonishing.
Everybody involved has, in some sense, become at once the designers, the visitors, the gardeners,and the owner of the Walled Garden.
I hate the idea of ‘participatory’ design when it is pushed at me as a bit of worthy architectural practice, but we should recognise that this is what we’ve all been doing.

The grid idea is interesting – for the last couple of years I have been having fantasies of creating a garden along these lines, and will probably to some extent do so on part of my new patch near Hay. Clearly a zeitgeist thing. For me it is order beds in botanic gardens, like the Chel absolutely enthralling place – something about the complete artlessness of making a rigid functional pattern, so you are completely focussed on the plants – ultimate plantsmanship I suppose.

And yet I hate the stamp-collector’s gardens I sometimes see in my journalism work – I tend to run screaming from the scene. I suppose what appeals about the grid is its ‘anti-design’ aspect, I get to see so much over-design, and the whole design scene is getting terribly overheated. What this is leading up to is that I think the parabola grid could work really well – the idea that it can act as an almost neutral background to anything makes it ideal for this scheme’s intended order of events.

Given the overpopulation of this island with garden designers, it is refreshing to do something which makes such a conscious break with the conventional design process – FOA making a framework/canvas and someone else filling it in. It makes a separation between what I have always thought are the two main activities which makes up a garden designer’s work: overall spatial design and planting design. So many g/designers are good at the first and bad at the second; and in fact planting design is a real poor relation within the profession as a whole – which I suspect is partly a reflection of what is often a gender divide – Harold’s planning and Vita’s planting is a pattern we see again and again. It is also a reflection that to be good with planting design you have to know about plants, which takes

1) a long time to accumulate the knowledge and

2) experience in growing them – and many garden designers have not given themselves the time to do either. By taking the framework planning out of the equation, the gardener can concentrate on the planting; the planting will effectively be what people will see and respond to – the framework grid will be perhaps be most successful if visitors do not notice it. The planting will therefore be centre stage – so the whole project becomes an exercise in foregrounding planting design – what you can do to spatial design with plants. Does this achieve what you wrote “ (I) Am trying to reinforce a connection between planting and landscape somehow lost between landscape architecture and plantsmanship. as now practised in isolation from each other so much of the time.”?

One of the great advantages of the FOA design is that it forces the planting design out of the straitjacket of the border which has constrained and limited planting design in Britain. And yes, it might be very exciting to get someone from overseas to be the gardener – we have had far too few foreign gardener/designers working here, and exported far too many borders. I think the potential effect of foregrounding planting design is fantastic - but then I would, as the lack of respect given to it as a discipline is well know to be one of my pet subjects. What I think would be very valuable would be if the whole Hadspen project acts as a stage or the continuing and on-going performance of planting design as an art form.

It is so obviously an art form, but it is difficult to get it accepted as such. The idea of linking planting and garden design to a wider artistic and creative world of ideas, and to the community of practising artists and the discourse of the intelligentsia, is one which I think is very important – but quite an uphill struggle. It would be marvellous if the Hadspen parabola could continue to do this, not just in the process of commissioning and in its initial phase.

It seems to me that we ought to think about how this ongoing discussion can be maintained and nurtured into the future as a self-sustaining entity, even at this early stage. An annual symposium perhaps? What about non-planting elements? Sculpture? Texts (� la Finlay)? Performances? Installations? If so, who would commission? How would this integrate with the role of the gardener?

I don’t know quite what to make of these different responses. It seems that we are wrinkling a few brows. Silence would have been more painful. Interestingly, most of the criticisms seem to point to the brief being too dense of a document to make itself transparently known as a set of guides in the affairs of the gardener, who is required to bring great vision to this study. Garden-in-the-head and garden-in-the-flesh are certainly subjects not to be dismissed. Are they not both required to make a great garden? The great Parterres had their geometries and the Picturesque their surveyors. The parabola’s proposal is presently a method of looking at the problem.

I remember the interesting spatial experience of the walled garden when I visited; it was one of the main things that caught my attention: sometimes intimately interior, sometimes surprisingly expansive as you look into the distant landscape. The splines that suggest the flow of space are under-developed in the brief - the curve of the land, the curve of the wall, and the curve of the distant hills and topography. Stuart and I talked about how the intersections of the path network would provide points where these types of vantages are provided. And the switches in the scheme will allow the gardener the ability to choose/emphasize/obscure those types of experiences. We were always backing away from ‘defining’ the space (the gardener’s job with both structural plantings and herbaceous planting). The brief is intentionally a waiting background scaffold when it comes to garden programming.

Very good then that the painters should assert a model built from painterly things - lucidity, focus, precision.
And you are dead right about the poor Visitor.
In the best of all possible worlds, I would like to elide altogether the designer and the client - and just focus on making the experience of the visitor as close as possible to the gardener’s own.

Following the plot, gardeners seem inclined to treat words like plants, with a greater interest in their fecundity, and the ways in which they hang together, than in their brisk purpose.� Sensual pleasures, I suppose.

Is it ingenuous to ask about the Visitor, who seems to have vanished amongst the Gardeners and Architects and Clients?� I know most of them are probably just Gardeners under another name, but there was a sort of Popeian Chimaerical Perambulator who used to get invoked, and with whom I am inclined to identify.� Does the audience just fall out of the process obediently/radically?� Would that they would do that for me.