Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse
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 -