Thanks for the reply Niall. I heard Nori talking about the origin of the allee a couple of years ago at a Society of Garden Designers conference - evolution rather than revolution in garden design perhaps! It was one of my favourite features on visits to the garden, particularly when contrasting the shadowy lane it formed with the open space of the lawn alongside.
 
It must be very difficult to be the private owner of what has been a public space - so many of us feel an attachment to what has been there before - but it is a very exciting project too and, without doubt, a clean canvas is the easiest way to proceed on this scale. Please keep up the photographs - I drive past the house almost every day and it’s frustrating to know that great things are going on just out of sight!
 
It will be fascinating to see the design of paths laid out on the ground - mathematically it’s beautiful, but I have reservations about how it matches the practical brief (I’m sure you’ve heard them all before). I can’t think of any other garden like it - perhaps, on a smaller scale, the closest in feel would be the kitchen garden at Bury Court - but that’s much more rectilinear. The planting will be so powerful in controlling the final atmosphere and scale of the space - I don’t subscribe to the argument that plantsmen can’t design!
 
May I wish you every success with the project - and if you need a volunteer for anything muddy I live just around the corner!

Thanks. I wasn’t there, so the photograph was the first thing I saw as well. Without sounding disingenuous, or too like Cromwell, I admit to being rather appalled myself by what I had done. There are perhaps two things to say in this context. The existence of the allee itself was always an accident. It was planted as a hedge by my mother and ‘bolted’ between her regime and Nori and Sandra’s. For that reason, the trees were always far too close together and the whole thing was in danger of toppling. This isn’t an excuse, simply something that would have happened in due course. The other point is how enthusiastic people have been over the last week or two, and in contrast, about the possibilities offered by the photographs of the whole cleared site.
 

Call me old-fashioned, but my particular response to the image of a chainsaw being taken to the long hedge (one of Hadspen’s entirely original design features) was a physical pain in the stomach. Still, we watch on with interest….

I’ve been reading the website and struggling somewhat with both the confusing nature of the bits and pieces and with the level of abstraction. My brain doesn’t quite work like that. And struggling toowith the implications of what you’re doing for me, again personally.



I think you are paying respect to the gardener/designer. In spite of having removed, as Louisa points out,a massive chunk of the design process. A shame. But still, this is amazing - I experience the garden world that I am party to as having no interest in the role of the gardener/designer. Because :-



a) there is a major camp who privilege gardening as what gardens are about, even when they are, like Mary Keen, gardener/designers too. (Probably) I can’t claim to understand quite what design means to them outside of feelings/plants/doing activity/atmosphere sorts of things. There is a pressure from them to discount gardens as a possible means of communication with others and an expression of more than the process of gardening as a pleasant and worthy activity. When they discuss design I think they therefore are often confused and confusing. I come from just having read Mary in the Spectator reviewing some garden picture books. Her confrontation of the picture book culture is welcome, but she then applauds what is clearly one of those books by self depreciatory, lovable middleaged women (yes, and I am one of the latter, forget the adjectives) about slugs. God help us.



b) on the other hand (and this develops your own dualism I think) celebrity designers are to most people what design is about. And I see them as handicapped by their role on the outside, at best only tinkering with their creation after their initial imput to someone else’s brief.


So how will people respond to the idea of the designer/gardener? Will they be able to give weight to all the strengths such a person will need to have? Will your restriction of their role to the planting feed the usual prejudices and support the ‘off to see the planties’ brigade?


My own place in all this? I increasingly feel that my feelings about my garden and the process of gardening it need to be private. (see above…) However, I do also know that each time I go out and interact with the garden (called gardening) I shape it: design it. I also did and do ‘design’ it in the popular sense. And I also know that I am doing something that is other than (rather than ‘more’ than) decorating with plants. I do want to communicate some of my response to this place and its context and history in ways that words don’t encompass.



I need that communication to work, or I have clearly failed - but I know that most of our visitors read the garden only at the level of admiring the plants and fretting about any weeds. And there you find the genesis of thinkingardens …


So where does that leave me in thinking about Hadspen? Well - still confused. Am I going to be delighted or horrified by what emerges? and I don’t mean just on the land, I mean in the dialogue you are promoting. (This is great by the way, however it all goes) Have I totally missed the point? Do I understand it at all? How will your designer/gardener cope with the stuff their role will attract. (I would be happy to offer moral support to them, think they will need it.) How will Gardener’s World cope - or is it just their kind of gardens-are-planting thing?


This is really thinking aloud as a way of trying to grasp your project - your response will tell me if I am succeeding. Oh - didn’t those 100 year gardens turn out to be a myth? That they were designed more round existing trees than the ones planted for their heirs?