At an early stage in the process, someone suggested that a solution to the problem posed by the walled garden might be to tear down the wall. It turns out the first part of the solution has been to tear down the garden. 
 
Looking through the photographs, I’m taken by the particular beauty of the garden over the various phases of its undoing: as lazy, then wild and now bare. And the image of the cleared garden is especially good for seeing the shape and the slope of the thing. 
 
You may not have torn down the wall, but you have turned the space inside out. The garden, now, is outside the wall.

The garden looks wondrous in its naked state.

What a space to watch grow.
For a space that will grow on you.

Subject: di punto in bianco

THRILLING!!
 
must try to get over, can’t quite see when.
 
Here at last is the blank - that is to say - the sacred canvas 
Pain, too - ‘has an Element of Blank -’
 
This rarest of intervals -
when the blankness is all -
no greater brinkmanship -
or blessing -
 
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
I had hoped this was all fairly UNbritish, which is why I need your help.
 
Many thanks for looking at it.
 

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.
 

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 -