I enjoyed seeing you both on telly. Isabel said you are a pair of unreconstructed toffs . Well some of us like that.

I’m sure that the sense (which I share) of the garden being so much smaller is as of an unfurnished room - particularly one with large and dramatic outward views.

But it also feels like a very large imaginative challenge for the gardener; particularly since it is now so clear that he or she will be compelled, as part of the project, to make some response to what is outside. Even a decision to exclude the pakland and trees, if that is even possible, will demand planting interventions on a scale that will dramatically effect other design decisions.

For me it is rather exciting that, as walled gardens go, this one is so ambiguous. At least in its current state exclosure seems a better description than enclosure.

On the FOA paths – I’m keeping an open mind. In any case, there’s plenty of time to challenge them, both before and (if we do make them in their present for) after. Any good gardener will want to fight them in one way or another, and it will be very easy for them to obliterate the superfluous ones.

In fact, I have two rather contradictory responses to what you say about them.
On the one hand, they have proved their worth already as a provocation - by raising the stakes in the current discussion. Everybody who has been looking at the space, or visiting the website, is contributing to a process that has to be allowed to go wherever it goes. Without sounding too heretical, there is a sense in which a garden is simply the representation of all the thinking (by gardeners, owners, visitors) that has gone into it. I’m setting about remaking the Walled Garden in the very unconventional way that I am with the idea that there is an untapped world of informed and passionate thinking and feeling about gardens (witness your fantastic letter), that can be captured and directed at the project before a single plant goes into the ground. Would you have written if I had proposed something more conventional? Or if you had really liked the zig-zags?

My other response is to acknowledge that, as architects, Foreign Office have thought about the project in terms of the experience of a visitor moving through a space. It may be that this corresponds with a tendency of my own to feel most comfortable when I am on my way somewhere else; it is certainly true that what I am doing in the larger landscape at Hadspen, and in the woods, is mostly a response to the imagined perceptions of an energetic walker.

Having said this, I have to accept, on the basis of what you and others are saying, that we definitely need to incorporate into the competition Brief the idea that simply hanging out in a sequestered gardened space is in itself legitimate and rewarding.

In a way this seems to bring us right back round to the enclosure/exclosure question, to which we don’t yet know the answer either in terms of the ultimate design. But until we had cleared the garden, and until you had at me so very articulately, I certainly didn’t know that there were questions there that needed answering.

Clearly I can’t have it both ways. I have tried to dismantle as many as possible of the conventional mechanisms in the process of design that exist to reduce the uncertainty of outcome.

I’d like to formulate all the questions before trying to answer any one of them; it doesn’t absolutely follow that this will produce a remarkable garden, although I hope it might.

Anyway, a big thank you.

Well Niall, (if you’ll pardon the expletive) that’s one hell of a hole you’ve made!
 
I went to visit the garden today. I got my mourning out of the way first by looking through my old photos of the place as I used to love it - then went to visit with a clear mind. Even so I was pretty blown away by the site in its new nakedness. The effect of topography is so much more pronounced without the disguise of the earlier planting - and it was quite difficult to get a human feeling of scale in the empty space - at first I thought how much smaller it felt, but then, after visiting the remainder of the garden, I came back to the walled area and thought how large it seemed. The rest of the garden has a melancholy beauty, with roses still blooming on the wall even in December - and one half expects to find Sleeping Beauty lying in state in the tea room!
 
If one can anthropomorphise a space - there was a sense of waiting, of expectancy, but also of great peace in the emptiness. There were looming clouds all morning then, just as I was about to leave, the winter sun came out through the bare branches of the surrounding trees, reflecting in the water-filled wheel-ruts like a Grimshaw painting - truly lovely even “in the bleak midwinter”.
 
More than anything else this made me feel that FOA’s busy-busy zig-zags are not the solution to the space (if you’ll excuse the gut-feelings of a “small domestic” garden designer compared to the detailed analysis of a full-blown architectural practice!) I’d been thinking this with my head for a while - the single design speed with no respite, the difficulty of maintenance, the failure to understand how garden visitors behave in a space - but being in the garden actually makes you feel this emotionally - in the heart too. It is still a garden, even though emptied, and has its own distinctiveness: the woods; the fields; the seedling aquilegias still giving it their best shot; the howling wind coming up through the south gate! You seemed to hint in your last email that the design might yet evolve and, if the vote of one dedicated garden visitor counts then I really think that should happen.
 
The FOA design is an imaginative response to the topography and channels visitors around to look at planting schemes, but what then? On previous visits I’ve seen people happy just to be in the space - toddlers running on the lawn, dedicated plantaholics photographing the national collection (what happened to that?) older folks sitting in the sun, garden enthusiasts like me with notebooks jotting down ideas. Even if it remains a private space - what is going to make you want to sit in there peacefully of an evening and watch the light change?
 
Enough ranting! Thank-you for letting me visit - you have an amazing space to be creative in. The worst destruction has passed now and, although there’s a huge amount of work to be done, I’m sure the process of creating the new garden will be extremely satisfying. Can’t wait to see how it progresses!

Thanks for the details. I have been away in Mexico.
 
I hope you don’t mind me commenting, but I feel I must … That design for the paths is awful. It is just the sort of naff rubbish that architects usually design for gardens. Very trendy, very now, very CUTTING EDGE, but as far as I can tell it apparently bears no relationship to the site, and as good garden design it simply doesn’t work. What are all those horrible, harsh, zig zag ends to the paths? Did anyone honestly imagine what it actually might be like ’on the ground’? To walk around? To be in? How it might make one feel?
 
I really pity the poor soul that has to try and pull together a beautiful garden that not only looks good, but more importantly FEELS GOOD out of that.
 
BTW I am the very opposite of anti-modern. I love good modern design. I detest the regurgitation of the same old tried and tested.
 
Saying all that, I wish you all the best and hope it all works out for you.

  
Thanks so much. If you have a chance, have a look at the archive correspondence particularly in August and September. You will see that there was a pretty universal howl of concern from the gardeners about the points of the zig zags. We are thinking about that, and how we might modify the path layout.
 
On the layout itself, it might be worth working through the pdfs of the Foreign Office scheme. The criteria on which they based their research (and which ultimately produced their scheme) is very specific indeed to the site.
 
The whole point of the exercise has been to provoke reactions, both positive and negative. Yours is a treat.

I owe you an apology I see, if only for my complete ignorance. What you wrote is very interesting about who owns and who gardens, quite a subject in its own right. One that I’m interested in now because of an ongoing project called Welcome to the Garden, a little book of advice to people who want to visit and those who want to open their gardens, both activities being rather newly-fashionable in France. Most of my examples, quotations etc come from interviews and readings in France, but perhaps you would want to add a word of advice, either to visitors or owners just opening? the relationship to gardeners is one issue, for both. I have also been asking for things like: most annoying or most helpful comments, examples of memorable visits, or what qualities should a garden have to make you want to return? All that sort of thing.

What you write about site and paths sounds very reasonable and most people would agree with you but Gilles (if I may speak for him as I seem to be doing these days) would not, at least for his students. He feels if you make the list of all those constraints and then try to deal with what’s left over, you have lost your first spontaneity, your first gut feeling about what the space is about. It sounds however as if you have no choice here anyway. And the situation you describe is sufficiently intriguing and challenging that you should get a good list of candidates, I would think? Good luck.

Many thanks; my instinct is to leave you and the Great Man in peace. But two points for clarification: 
 
1. Picking up on your comment about ‘new’ ownership and avoiding sounding pompous about proprietorship: I have lived there all my life, the garden and everything else has been under my effective management for the last 20 years. Managerially, there have been three different gardens within the walled space - a vegetable garden ruled with a rod of iron by my grandparents’ gardener, an ornamental garden made by my mother for herself, and the garden made by the Popes, as my tenants, for the public. The current project is a ‘riff’ on the complicated status and interactions of owners, designer/owners, gardener/designers and the public. This won’t be the last garden on site, which is why we have been trying to find a path layout which will serve for anything that may come along in the future.
 
2. And on the issue: paths first or last? Not to sound defensive, there did seem to me a palpable tension between a need to interrogate the site, and the need, in making any garden, to provide it with an intelligible form. I believe in both approaches, and a close reading of the Foreign Office analysis (within the pdfs of the scheme, posted on the site) shows that they were trying to produce a buildable diagram from a very considered analysis of the site. Among other things they were looking at: climate, soil, drainage, aspect, microclimate, history, and the Wall itself as an (immovable) artefact. It is quite a list; I’m not saying they succeed entirely. Thanks again.

I also forwarded your last e-mail to Gilles. He had not understood exactly what was involved, he says. I think maybe Hadspen is so famous in the UK that you assume too much prior knowledge away from the British context? It took me a while to remember why that name was familiar and it probably isn’t to Gilles at all, so he did not know, as I did not, that you were the new owner. However I don’t know if he will answer, he says (in his mail to me) that he agrees that to begin with paths already laid out is the wrong approach. What you have and what you seem to want to do seems worlds apart from his approach. But perhaps this is not true, since you are so interested in what he does. I don’t know. But I think it will seem this way to him.

I’m surprised that you are so familiar with Gilles Clément and his work, but of course pleased. The bit about paths is in my chapters, the biography bit about his teaching at Versailles and then a section in the general essay on his gardens. 

There is another book just out of Clément’s essays edited by me, covering his work from 1985-2006, “Où en est l’herbe: réflexions sur le jardin planétaire” with Actes Sud available on Amazon, it’s a small paperback of fifteen essays that I chose from the mountain he gave me to read for the other book, old speeches, forgotten articles and unpublished things like an account, turned into fiction, of his trip to Scotland to see Jencks, Goldsworthy and Finlay. Good luck with the Fustiers and with your project.

I am really sorry, I should have replied before to thank you for yours. You are probably right, it’s probably young garden makers that I need. Any other thoughts on these as they occur to you would be much appreciated. Am very intrigued by Gilles Clement’s proscription against paths. In a limited sense, I do think that we are both trying to address the same  problem. I am an enormous admirer of Une Ecologie Humaniste, and am currently half way through the essays that the CCA have just published around the exhibition in Montreal. What he said over the years is mostly what has convinced me that the issues I am interested in are being thought about more deeply.