Jenny Woods to Niall Hobhouse
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!