My name is John Kennedy. I am a landscape architect based in Scotland.

I’ve been following your project with interest and now feel compelled to write to you because although I applaud your worthy intentions I can’t help speaking out about some of stuff on the website.

FoA’s ‘on landscape’ text falls into the trap most students of landscape architecture fall foul of when trying to articulate their thoughts on landscape and that is to talk in terms of the “natural” and the “artificial” These terms are unhelpful unless you explicitly set out what the “natural” and the “artificial” are. Which is not as easy as you might think.

Further difficulties arise when these terms are discussed in an historical context; for example, in the 18 Cent poetry of Alexander Pope, his idea of “nature” more closely approximates to our modern notion of “common sense” than it does to the popular concept of “nature” as (morally) pure and uncorrupted by mankind (which has its origins in the romantic movement poets like Wordsworth) (As an aside, Pope’s concept of “Imitation” is much more sophisticated and intelligent that simply copying, for example in his translations of Homer.)

FoA’s invocation of Hogarth’s “Nature abhors a straight line” argument, is not really true; consider Newton’s First Law of Motion (one of the fundamental laws of nature)
A body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion continues to move in a straight line with a constant speed unless and until an external unbalanced force acts upon it. That is, an object with no net force acting upon it has a constant velocity.

The idea of the opposition of an artificial linear geometry and a “less determined” geometry of the picturesque, and that this has “structured the history of landscape” is a hypothesis that cannot really be substantiated and doesn’t really stand up to any serious scrutiny.

Finally the idea that “complexity” does not apply to “simple” geometric forms is plainly ridiculous. Even the most basic form, such as a circles, squares or parabola, can be expressed in complex mathematical terms, to the extent that throughout history the properties of regular geometric forms and patterns to be (visually) simple and (mathematically) complex have been seen as a window into the mysteries of the universe and therefore to hold sacred and mystical power.

To create visually satisfying compositions form “simple” geometry you need to apply a proportioning system using the golden section and fibonnacci series. These mathematical systems are the foundation of classical architecture and the modern movement in architecture too. These proportioning systems are also expressed in “natural” structures and systems, such as plants and animals, river systems etc.

Another mistake; confusing the idea of “the landscape” with “the land” the former being a cultural construct that exists in peoples minds, the latter being what exists in reality; this is a more helpful way of thinking about “natural” and “artificial”
Of course there is a great deal of exchange between these two poles but at least one can start thinking about and debating ideas using these two concepts as terms of reference.

Anyway what you need to think about is the idea of “garden” rather than “landscape”

A garden is, to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the resources and interests of the patron, an expression of the designer’s or patrons idea of paradise, whether you think you are designing that or not is irrelevant: a garden is an opportunity to reconfigure the world how you think it should be; to reconcile “landscape” with “land,” a vision into reality.

On the following statement:

“As professionals, landscape designers often work in a vacuum of knowledge about plants and plant systems; in contrast, plantsmen find it hard to use their knowledge to inform a disciplined approach to overall design.”

I couldn’t disagree more; i think this is an unhelpful generalisation and actually quite rude to people who actually do have spatial design talent and a wealth of plant knowledge; these people do exist. However, even if there was some congenital barrier encoded into the entire human race that prevented the emergence of people with the range of skills sufficient to create convincing spatial designs using plants, there is a simple solution: its called team work. (example: Lutyens and Jekyll)

You’re trying to build a team; FoA are part of that team, but they’ve started by setting out a deeply flawed design philosophy, and imposing a “footpath layout” onto the site, both of which, notwithstanding the quality of the work, do not as far as I can seen engender a spirit of a genuine desire for collaboratve and collective endeavour but rather a master-servant relationship where the “gardener” colours in the green bits on the architect’s plans.

To put what you are proposing into context, it’s exactly the same as the way planting schemes in Tesco car parks are delivered; by a “design and build” landscape contractor who is brought in after the hard landscape works are completed.

I think you need more than a “Gardener” to execute this project; you need to build a team of people that are capable of delivering the depth and range of skills you need to deliver to your expectations. I think your project would really benefit from a good landscape architect, an ecologist, a philosopher/poet, and a visual artist with a background in sculpture.

I think what you’re doing is really exciting and wish you all the best with your project.

Hope this helps.

I just looked at the correspondence in the site, which I had not visited for a while, and I was amazed at the scale and level of the conversation. I think the mechanism you set for the selection is pretty good as you will get interesting feedback in the first phase, and you can always check the credentials of the candidates in the second filter. I think disallowing proposals in the first phase will work, as you ensure that the candidates have some level of intellectual ambition. (some people may feel cheated of doing very well in the first phase and being discarded on the second for lack of track record though…) I suppose that the first phase being conceptual is likely to exclude pure gardeners from the contest… But that may be fine provided that in the second phase, the conceptual entrants can demonstrate some level of gardening ability. I really do not know what is out there in this field, so I can not predict what you will get… 

I have not read in detail yet the correspondence and something may have escaped my diagonal reading but I do not see reasons to modify the design. I am still very happy with the proposal and I think it is a very interesting project (as a whole, also your brief, the website, the way it is developing etc…) Has the correspondence made you question some parts of the design? If so, please let me know and we can consider it. 

I would really like to see the paths drawn on the site when you do them, so let me know and we can organise a weekend visit to the garden.

If you have a chance to look at the Submissions page on the website, and the Addendum to the Manifesto page you will see that the recent website process (also worth reading in the correspondence) has resulted in a shift in my ground.The important point for you is that the initial competition submissions disallow a proposal of any kind. Your design remains out-there for the short listed candidates:

The next question is whether you want to revisit the scheme in any way in the light of the commentary it has generated and being able now to see the cleared site in relation to the bigger landscape. I believe that this last is the really important factor. It is entirely up to you – although I am happy to pay – and you don’t need to decide immediately. We are currently doing a very small regarding to return the soil levels to the (inferred) original contour, and will then sow it with rye grass. We can then mow the paths for competitors to examine in the last few weeks of the competition. The Initial Submissions are set to close in July. I am thinking early May therefore for a re-visit. Let me know what you feel.

Niall Hobhouse:
Given that we have agreed to examine design as a form of research can I push harder on the parallels with scientific process? Does your experience suggest an answer to any of the following?:

What do architects mean when they say that a good building needs a good client?
Why should architects say that a tight design brief makes for a better design? By ‘tight’ do they mean specific and detailed or just lucid? Is there something in the mantra of a friend of mine: good design produces happy accidents?

The last was in response to reading about the discovery of penicillin in the (wonderful) Faber book of Science.

Jenny Woods:
These take a bit of mulling over – and I’m not sure I have any particular ‘scientific’ insight here, I’ll just build some answers from my own opinions and experience.

Whilst working for EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) I was asked to take up the role of ‘Quality Champion’. One of the buzz phrases used to describe quality is ‘fitness for purpose’ – so we could interpret ‘a tight design brief makes for a better design’ as a ‘good’ or high-quality design getting a tick in all the boxes that the client has specified in the brief. I suspect this holds in the majority of ‘bread-and-butter’ design work. However, the client can only build their brief based on their experience and world-view, and it may be the case that the architect or professional designer has a wider experience and can create a ‘better’ design than is specified by the client. Strictly speaking this may not be such a ‘high-quality’ design as it has moved away from the brief, but in some way - artistically, creatively – we judge it as ‘better’. Obviously if we were running this ‘project-management style’ we’d re-write the brief and objectives at this point, but we’re talking creatively for the moment!

Niall Hobhouse:
This works a treat; in fact, I don’t see any need NOT to rewrite the brief, etc, just because we are talking ‘creatively’. We should be ruthless with the parallel, and say that there is really no distinction between mechanisms of ‘creative’ design and the scientific sort.
From my observation of architects, they welcome this collaborative stage of writing the rules for themselves, and see it as part of designing. It is only by way of rules that the finished design achieves coherence and logic.

What is surely critical is that any client brief in its final version makes it clear what the designed thing is FOR - getting to the moon, sitting on, memorializing the victims of 9/11. But it should never say HOW. Where it reads ‘ensuite bathroom’ what is meant is that the client will want to be able to have a bath, and without leaving the bedroom.The client is unthinkingly trying to be the designer.

Jenny Woods:
I’m not very good at these generalisations so let me give you an example. Whilst a student (2nd time around!) we were given the opportunity to enter the design competition for the British Memorial Garden to be built in Hanover Square, New York. This had a pretty tight brief, including such entertaining items as ‘no tall planting (to stop muggers hiding)’, ‘individual park-style benches (to stop skateboarders playing on them)’, ‘planting to include British wildflowers’ . We students stuck as tightly as we could to the brief and I was pretty chuffed to be shortlisted in the student competition. The overall winners were the Bannermans and I learned so much by looking at their design after having wrestled with the same brief myself. They did not meet those specifications I’ve listed above - they created marvellous continuous cut-stone arcs as benches; threw out the wildflowers as totally impractical; put in tall topiary to give the design strength – and came up with a design that was far better than any which matched the brief could have done – because they were better designers than the committee which set the brief.

Niall Hobhouse:
I remember this as one of the stupidest competition briefs I could have imagined; it deserved to be ignored. To continue from above, brief writing is one of the least understood (and most casually embarked upon) aspects of a creative project, even for one where the basic pragmatic objectives are not in dispute.

In the case of a garden - and this may be our knub - there are real problems about what they are ‘for’, as documented by the web correspondence. Produce, science, visiting, show, solitude, entertaining, different things at different times, even different-things-to-different-people …

No clear client brief could be easily built out of this chaos, and offering to share inspiration with the client is perhaps all that is left to the designer. He or she just needs to be clever -like Mary - to work this out , and then to stick to their guns . And fair enough, in its way.
My problem is that so often, and almost by definition in a garden that is not the designers own, the inspiration feels on loan - borrowed by the garden, if you like; not honestly shared.This is why I am so interested -as the pleasure I want from mine- in the oppurtunity of observing a gardener in his own garden .This is a good brief statement of MY client brief; it is quite close, as I’ve said, to what the Nori and Sandra did offer until last year.

Jenny Woods:
Actually that’s probably just an argument for client and designer working together to define the brief – which will happen on most projects (except where there’s a competition!).

Niall Hobhouse:
In the open stage of the competition we are not asking for a response to a brief but only for conceptual approaches.

Jenny Woods:
I’m going to try to include an image here to illustrate ‘happy accidents’ – I’m sure they arise as even the most open-minded designer is working from their own mental model and can’t foresee every way their designed object will be used (actually the more I think about this, the more delighted I am by it)

This little chap is enjoying a garden at the Westonbirt Festival. I watched him run round and round, completely absorbed, oblivious to his parents’ calls. I doubt the designers (David Meyer and Ramsey Silberberg) had specifically thought ‘this would be good to entertain kids’ – I expect their thoughts were more along the lines of mine on looking at the garden as a restful space with a strong, simple theme. I’d like to use this as a counter-argument to your letter to Anne and speak up in defence of Mary Keen by saying that I believe instinct does have a part in recognising good design. The child couldn’t intellectualise why he liked the space, yet he was still totally engaged by it. I wonder if this is a part of our brain that has evolved pattern-recognition at a very primitive level – we evolved in situations where we didn’t have the time to think “Hmm, a balanced pattern of contrasting-coloured stripes, what are my options here?”, we just needed to get the message “Tiger! Run away!” After we have escaped we can rationalise why we got the danger message, in the same way that we can split a design into its elements and understand why it is good, although the artist creating it was probably not consciously running the design principles through their mind.

Niall Hobhouse:
He is charming, your little chap; the designer should be very happy.

At the start of Russell Page’s autobiography there is a description of his design process which, apart from its diffidence and elegance of expression, might have been formulated by any doctrinaire modernist. Eventually, he says: ‘everything that detracts from the idea of a unity must go.’ Just suppose that a great architect designs a building that is uniquely focussed in intention on the effect of natural light within its interior.
I would not then take a beautiful (and unpredictable) change in the light as a happy accident, but as a demonstration of the success of the design. However fortuitously, the building has acheived it’s objective of being a receptacle in which light behaves to beautiful effect. It is the unique focus - the unity - of the design that makes one understand this as an achievement of the building, and not a chance effect of the light.

Jenny Woods
Perhaps the best designers are ‘just’ able to instinctualise the design principles – Kim’s ‘thinking very fast’ again?

Niall Hobhouse:
I do agree that good designers have something that most people don’t, and I really like this formulation. My thought is that we are talking about processing power, not simple speed -ie. loads of memory as well. Does this allow them to envisage many more options than others, and is that it? ‘Design principles’ then do the rest. Or is there a force which I’ve missed in your ‘just’, which bears somehow on the skill in identifying which option is the right one?

Jenny Woods:
In the meantime, there are snowdrops and primroses flowering by the gate and the scent of Sarcococca is haunting the Peach Walk – is it time to stop intellectualising and start gardening?

Niall Hobhouse:
I completely agree; this needs no reply. Thank you in any case.

Thank you for your letter. I think both the points and the questions that need answering are correct.
 
As I have said already, I think the issue about a first ‘intuitive’ response has had a good airing in the last week. I still hope that nothing in my ‘process’ will inhibit any designer from working in the way that he or she finds most comfortable.
 
 I don’t want to burden anybody with issues of cost at this point. This is part of the reason why in the anonymous first stage we have asked only for indications of  an  approach to the project, as represented in imagery and words. The question of cost, and the specifics of the rest of the design requirements, will become only too concrete in due course. It is worth adding, as I said somewhere to Kim Wilkie in the earlier correspondence, that I do believe in a ‘whole of life’ approach to the costing of any project.
 
You are quite right about the horse-shoe wall. Its interest is in part to do with the oddness of its geometric form as it is laid into the very uneven topography of the site. I think Patrick Taylor’s comments related as much as anything to the very discouraging physical barriers that were imposed in the past between the Main House and the Walled Garden. These did reflect a different attitude to the visitors, and to the management of the Estate. In fact, that part of the garden is as remote as it could conveniently be from the House; it isn’t really possible to see the two together.
 
My plan for the immediate future is to occupy for my own use only a fairly small part of the House itself, and I already live in another house some way away. It is certainly the intention to re-establish the three or four lines of access between House and Parabola that are suggested by the landscape, planting and walls. Overall, I have to recognize that the Walled Garden has become in the last 30 years an equally, if not more, powerful ‘centre’ to the Estate. I am trying to formalize this revaluation, and want to play with a different overall approach to the Estate that would allow various centres, or points of focus, that balance each other.
 
On the other hand, there is a fortuitous - but very powerful - relationship between the Walled Garden and the Park and woodland. The area within the wall represents a tiny fraction of this much larger ‘gardened’ landscape. I am certainly very interested in the uneven texture that varying intensities of gardening activity give to any landscape. In this case, I hope that a powerful gardening ’performance’ within the Wall will work as a kind of counterpoint to the wilder spaces outside. In fact, I’d like the executed project to be just as strongly declarative as the effort that is going into formulating it as a project. If it succeeds in this way, it will make some of the decisions about what to do elsewhere, both in the garden proper and in the landscape, much simpler to make. I was always uneasy, for instance, with the Pope’s preference for gardening as intensively outside the Walled Garden proper, as they did inside it. Whenever I was there I felt that the drama inside the wall would have been greater if it had come as a surprise.
 
It is worth saying therefore, and for the benefit of everybody, that my inclination for the rest of the former ‘public’ garden is to simplify it as much as possible, and my fixed intention is to remove everything from the immediate periphery of the wall itself (service buildings, greenhouses, etc) that get in the way of an appreciation of it both as a wall, and as a shape in the landscape.
 
I very much appreciate the thought you have put into this, and very glad you are enjoying watching it evolve. I would be very happy to answer any more questions that you raise.
 

Re: Preliminary thoughts on the site

You stressed recently that you were asking for reactions to the site for
the Hadspen Parabola and having read through the most recent
correspondence, I felt it was time to jump in, even if it seems
something like joining the mad hatter’s tea party. I shall try to be as
brief as I can.
 
Looking on things forcibly from a distance, I wonder if the first
impulse in any moment of creation, that is working first and foremost
from intuition, is not in danger of being lost. The theoretician can
lose sight of the practical considerations the artist has to begin with
- Van Gogh running out of paint for instance, and still managing to
create a masterpiece. When designing a garden one must begin with very
concrete premises: the site, the landcape surrounding it, the historical
context, the use the owner wants to put it to and, when we get to the
bottom line, how much money is available for the project.
 
In this case, the historical context is this remarkable horse shoe wall,
a masterpiece of high archaeological value. As far as I can see, it does
not fit into the landscape or have a connection to the house, but it
stands there as our starting point. It enclosed the kitchen garden and
one must remember that kitchen gardens in history were not necessarily
planned as part of the garden and park of the great house.
Considerations of aspect were far more important than access. Even today
in rural areas not blessed with a mild climate, the vegetable garden is
situated in the sunniest spot with suitable soil on the property. In
this light, Patrick’s comment may be irrelevant, but that is also a
point to be cleared. Do you want the Parabola Garden to have a
connection to the house or should it have its own entity in relation to
the landscape?
 
In fact, I like FO’s plan for the layout of the garden. It offers many
possibilities for various planting solutions. It is a big area with
plenty of space for emptiness from which to take in the further
landscape, for areas of intense planting and intimicy, for contemporary
sculpture at focal points and experiential spaces generally. Or how
would it be with a grass-stepped amphitheatre or a water feature?
 
Before a brief for designers can be drawn up, I feel many basic
questions have to be answered in order to crystallize the thought
process. Anyway, it is fun thinking about the project and should I be
invited to think further I should be very happy.
 
 

Very fair warning, thank you.

I hope I may have learnt enough from you to still catch the Inspired - if they haven’t been scared off by all the thinking and verbiage. Your concern will be whether I will know them when I see them.

Keats’ beautiful, and of course unanswerable for any who already believe.

Re: instinct: ‘If poetry come not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.’  If gardens are outdoor versions of lyric poems (for me and many) Keats says it all.  Of course you have to work out where you want to get to once inspiration has struck, but that is the way to do it.  Idea first, theory and rationale second.

I am really replying very late to your letter of 9th January, but I wanted to say first that the decision of the last few days to open up the competition as widely as possible was directly a response to a few correspondents’ intrigued, or kind enough to keep asking me the tough questions.  In relation to the Foreign Office paths, it was Jenny Woods who recalled me to the logic of my own process, and you who made me question why I was so determined to restrict the players to plants and plantsmen.  I was myself falling into the mire of my own ‘entrenched’ vocabulary – doing precisely the thing that I was accusing everybody else of doing.
 
I also wanted to acknowledge the justice of your comment about the absence of a play in the theatre analogy that I drew. This was quick, and apt, and funny; the omission is very telling in more ways that the ones that you suggest. I often think of myself in relation to this project as that character in Shakespeare Comedies, absent from before the start of the action, who appears only in the last act. It is his absence that has created the chaos out of which the action of the play is spun; and his reappearance that makes the moment for a (sometimes unconvincing) resolution. Order is restored by true identities being revealed, somebody being sent into exile, others being made to marry. A deus-ex-machina, in fact; not a rewarding role. God knows why I enjoy it.
 
To business:
 
You have seen Jenny’s account of blue-sky science research projects; it raises some of the same questions that you did. I thought I should be clearer – for everybody’s sake – as to what I have learnt about the process of design. Some of this I have said already, so it is a bit of a digest.
 
Most of this is from the perspective of architecture and urbanism, but I doubt that that world is really so different from garden design. For instance (and to begin with something fairly important) I remain unconvinced by Mary Keen’s preference for trusting to one’s instincts.  The ‘moves’ in the making of the design are always susceptible to rational explanation. I am not saying that a designer can always explain why he or she has made them, or that it is always necessary to do so.
 
I do know that if you look at a building for long enough you can always say why it is good (even great) or indeed bad; it does help to have knowledge and experience. I can’t think of a reason (beyond a distaste for intellectualization) why this shouldn’t also be the case with a garden. To dispense with thinking as a tool of analysis, and of design, feels contrary. At its most basic, for instance, it excludes any access to history. I was slightly comforted by Kim Wilkie saying that Mary’s appeal to instinct is mostly just her thinking very quickly indeed.
 
What I believe now is that the intellectual problems of gardening are in fact more diverse and complicated than those associated with a building.  This is at least partly because (as we discussed) we are all, designers in particular, trained to see gardens as places and not, as we should, through the places-we-call-gardens.  A lot of the unease about ideas could be resolved if the focus of  enquiry was shifted towards the performance of the gardener, gardenist, garden maker, whatever.
 
For a start, it becomes clear that garden design like any other form of design is a work of research, like any other form of research. It proceeds rhetorically through a series of propositions and hypotheses. This process is entirely and endlessly synthetic, in that it attempts to bring into alignment all sorts of very different contingencies, accidents and constraints. A good design is the one that makes out of this artifice something convincingly real, and immediate. This is a kind of rational miracle. Mary’s point is that one shouldn’t need to know the secret of the conjuring trick; mine is that understanding how the trick is done is a much richer experience, and makes one happy to watch it over and over again. Unless I was a five year-old, I would distrust any conjuror who claimed not to know how he had done it.
 
This account of the process makes it clear that one cannot frame the definition of design too broadly. Many, perhaps most, of the parameters that the designer tries to reconcile will never appear as such in any drawing, but they will be represented very vividly indeed in the final result - human anatomy in a chair, the Whiggish aspirations of Lord Cobham in the gardens at Stowe, development economics at Canary Wharf. My LSE experience relates to this, and in response to your question about it: in the design of a building, particularly in an urban context, one needs to be free to ask questions about why it is being built, why there, what it is trying to achieve, what are the human and economic processes that make it buildable, or the way in which its use may diverge over time from expectation.. To do this you need many different experts; they are all participants in the final design. It seemed to me that this rigour of enquiry was absent from almost all garden design or if it was there, it wasn’t referred to. This is why I was so happy that the discussion on the website took us so far away from the ‘look’ that may eventually be imparted to the garden at Hadspen, and with participants who know what they are talking about without wanting to compete. 
 
Since no researcher can honestly guarantee the success of his project, we have also been re-designing the process of design - so that it can evolve and allow all the different expectations and possibilities of a garden, and of a garden on that site, to be given a voice. Generally, what the client and the public understand as the value of the design process are only those elements of it that mitigate the risk of its failure. Among mechanisms of this type: – the preference for an ‘established’ designer; that the chosen designer is then trapped within an expectation of what his or her work should look like; and the isolation of the designer from the building process, by the imposition of (say) design-and-build contracts. There are plenty more, and taken all together they represent the heavy price that imaginative speculation pays to get anything built. 
 
My idea was simply to trade all of these for the possibility that something more interesting could emerge; they have proved to be not quite so easy to dismantle as I thought, but we are just about there. I do have to be very grown up about the risks I’m taking. 
 
To answer another of your questions at the same time, this design activity will not have failed if in itself that ’look’ turns out to be disappointing. What is built or planted will simply be one proposition (hopefully the best one) in a design process that has already been very productive. Gardens are astonishingly ephemeral things; think of my mother’s and the Pope’s garden on the Hadspen site.
 

Thanks. No not disheartened at all.

The sense of being overwhelmed is just the nearest thing that the I can imagine to a contemporary, unaffected, Sublime.