Niall Hobhouse to Jenny Woods
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.