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.

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