Lovely to receive your email today. I think you/we should shout pretty
loudly.



Interesting, your point about the “switches” suggestion on the paths. This
was actually one of the FAO bits that I quite liked, but in a rather
perverse
way. Yes, it would be trying to control the visitor (”access denied”) - and
to me that immediately opens up the exciting element of temptation to
trespass. I visited the garden in the Autumn and, like you, was enchanted by the sheer
romance of it - especially the peach walk and pond area. Feeling like an
intruder definitely added to the experience. Having areas becoming
overgrown,
thickets, I love. But I suppose any designer would need to be interested
in expected visitor numbers - if hordes must be planned for some things
would
just not be possible.\



Your comment about the Stipa made me think about childhood experiences of
being physically smaller in gardens, feeling plants arching above me.
Wouldn’t
it be fantastic to go a bit mad with quite ordinary things - buddleias,
honeysuckles,
big species roses, unpruned overwinter to create a tunnel-like experience?
Or even a network of tunnels?



Why do you feel this way about the allee, do you think? How important do
you think was the connection with the woodland? I was rather horrified by
the possibility (which I think was in Nialls brief somewhere) that the
woodland
entrance be removed altogether. For me this is a really magical bit of the
garden, it’s connection with the hillside and woodland which makes up such
a strong part of the atmosphere inside. Even if it is in some way
restricted,
or hidden, I feel it is essential this remains.



One aspect of the allee I loved (especially as I saw it against the low sun)
was looking South through the filigree of trunks, glimpsing the space
beyond.




Another thing I note about the FAO paths is this implicit assumption that
the garden will have a perimeter “gallery” planting round the curve. I know
that is the whole historic purpose of the structure - BUT. It is a beautiful
surface in its own right, it could  support plants trailing off into the
central area. It could even visually “repel” masses of planting in places.




Absolutely agree with your comment about the gutters (oops! water channels).
Daft is the word - I kept thinking maybe I was missing something critical
about drainage, but the site doesn’t seem to have any special problem here
does it? As far as that Southeast gate goes, my understanding from the
climate
parts of the FAO stuff was that without some opening in this, the lowest
corner, the wall would create a significant frost hollow, trapping the cold
air.



It’s strange, isn’t it, how a garden can be so powerful that it can draw
people in like this? I think what is happening is fascinating because Niall
is allowing the process to be accessible - licence to visit, comment,
fantasise,
and like you (and plenty of other people, I’m sure!) wish it were mine.



The big question has got to be - if the FAO suggestion is not right, what
would be?  No, haven’t visited the gardens you mentioned - maybe one fine
day.  Anyway, having had an enjoyable nosey around your website I realise
my waffling and questions will probably be the last thing you want after
the day’s work, so will sign off now.


Thank-you for your response to my letter - which only reached me today I’m
afraid! Got held up somewhere along the line.



Glad that I’m not the only one who thinks the FAO design is inappropriate
for the site - I feel a bit like the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes
story,but I’m not quite sure how loudly to shout “look at the king!”
I could see the zig-zags planted and viewed as a plan in an urban
environment - perhaps a courtyard overlooked by office blocks, but human
beings are not going to want to walk through it and enjoy spending time
in
it as a garden - and as for “switching” visitors around, don’t they
understand that garden visitors want to “do” the whole garden looking at
plants out of season as well as those at their peak.



Visiting the empty garden, if you knew it before, will be a shock. I’d seen
the photos, but it’s another matter actually being in the space. Quite
moving - the area outside the walled garden, by the tea house and water
tank
is really atmospheric with the original planting run wild (roses and
bananas!) but the great void of the walled garden is amazing (although I
still regret the destruction of the allee).



I think the ‘microclimate’ discussion of the South East corner is a red
herring! - the gate has been widened and opened up in recent years to allow
the view of the lake thus destroying any sheltering effect of the wall
intended by the original builders - visiting on a windy day in midwinter
soon illustrated that. The idea of a traversable pond (which would always
be
viewed in the wrong direction against the sun) and those horrid little
water
channels (which will dry up and go green in summer) is just daft.



I like what you say about structure imposed by planting - do you know
Broughton Grange and Bury Court? They are inspiring examples of spaces
created by plants - perhaps because I’m quite short and get dwarfed by
Stipa gigantea!



I really hope that the competition is thrown wide open again to generate
more ideas, there are so many things one could do with the site - from
purely planted designs to more structured approaches. Wish it was mine!


Two (almost rhetorical) questions;

Do you think that we are doing enough to stop the process of design congealing? There are so many mechanisms for minimizing risk built into the conventional process that it is hard to dismantle them all at one go. I’m pretty happy to reinstate the risks provided that what unfolds remains genuinely speculative and open to the end.
Â
Isn’t all the cleverness and wordiness on the site a bit much? These aren’t qualities in themselves that we need after all so much as visual imagination, determination and green fingers. How to make the presentation more gestural and powerful?
Â

Have seen the Quiraing only from a great distance; went on to the web, like
you for Petra, and see exactly now that it is GOD I need for a gardener. Will He like the idea of an anonymous competition?

Re: Anne Wareham Correspondence

Have sampled an online virtual tour of Petra, and can understand your excitement. Have your travels ever taken you to the Quiraing, on Skye? - a good place for anyone who feels nature is used up. Although here the main signs of human intervention are just the
paths…..

I too was unaware of the thinkingarden initiative - could turn out to be
interesting!

 As it happens your email ‘found’ me this afternoon wandering around Petra with my son.
Â
 Petra is very relevant to the discussion we are having. It’s not just that I’m there now; I think it passes any test that I could apply to a contemporary designed landscape.
 Â
Over several hundred years the Nabateans made a visually coherent sequence of rock-cut monuments, using the vertical sides of the gorges in the Shara Mountains.
The head of their pantheon was Dushara, ‘he-of-the-Shara’. All the gods resided in the rocks themselves- were the rocks, in fact; an intervention in the natural landscape was only for their glory.
Â
So the ‘designers’ of Petra saw an altar as a solid stone that was an apt physical medium for worship; they carved free standing cubes -twenty metres high and without ornament or opening- as god-blocks, and obelisks as representations of beams of light striking the earth ( I find this particular idea quite wonderful).From the cliff-faces they excavated monumental facades, indetirminately temples or tombs, perhaps both- but all with no interiors to speak of.Â
Their man-made lanscape was a beautiful integration of ideas, forms, and material. It gives revived meaning to ‘genius of place’
Â
 You don’t have to believe in gods, still less in gods-in-rocks, to find Petra powerful. In fact the ideas emerged from scholarship a hundred years after Petra had become part of the mythology of European landscape; so knowing them isn’t important in itself, and may well be a distraction.
At this remove, it also doesn’t much matter which came first, the Gods or the rocks; if I’d been around here in the second century BC, I would certainly have felt that the rocks were there to be worshipped.
Â
Of course we don’t know whether they gardened in Petra. Since gardens are always a sort of commentary on culturally-received ideas about nature, it feels unlikely that the Nabateans felt they needed to do any more of this.
Â
With my own garden -which has always been a garden- it seemed to make sense that the comments be made with plants; making a virtue of their naturalness, so to speak. (This isn’t facetious; I am just not a Martha Schwartz fan).
Choosing a plant and putting it in a particular place seem together the actions which, in repetition, make a garden. I thought it would be nice to start my quest for a designer with people who know about plants; they would at least know where to put them so they would grow.
Â
But it is going to be tricky finding someone who has ideas as shapely and internally convincing as those old Nabateans, so I may have to cast my net wider.
Â
 I was slightly reassured to discover that ‘nature’ for Raymond Williams has the most complex set of meanings of any word in the language. Perhaps the general problem with gardening these days is that nature is mostly used-up, or is plain unresponsive to new meanings. So the garden can now only really comment on it’s own history, and to make a good one you need to know either a very great deal, or nothing at all (and in both cases, surely to be asking something pretty impossible of that visitor of yours)
Â
Unfortunately I fall into neither category, having by now stretched naivety beyond credible limits.
Â
Do you know Michael Pollan’s Second Nature? It was a wonderful addition to the theoretical literature of gardening.
To the shame of all of us he, like Noel, has lately become much more interested in the ethics of food production.
Â
Where do good gardeners go when they die?
Â

Â
I certainly think that it’s time some questions were raised and discussed - with a certain rigour which has been sadly lacking, and you seem to be ahead of us there.
Â
I confess I haven’t yet found your clarification on your website - I got sidetracked by too many interesting things, including Louisa’s plans. So - para 7 - do please amplify your comment about context: I feel as if I’m grasping your meaning through gauze, in particular - how does this work? I know nothing about architecture though, or example would maybe do it.
Â
Leap to overall thought - it is a shame that you are not doing this design yourself, given your close link to the site and care for it - and all the thought that you have now put into the design issues. Then it could come from the heart; a dimension generally lacking because of the distances between designer, client and site. (see below) However …
Â
You say you have come down for the plantsman/gardeners. Well, maybe not. We all have to work within the limitations and demands of a particular site and plants are not entirely what you are left with. Nor does your designer have to offer yet another zoo for plants. Plantsmen do not only fail in scale after all. (tell me about it.) There is clearly still fantastic scope, hopefully for someone who is not obsessed with their material but who can see and imagine a wider picture. But they can’t landscape, change levels, add much form, can they? Not even a little, with all that structure there already.
Â
Which takes us to the ‘theatrical performance’ analogy - and what is fascinating and pertinent is that you have left out the play.
Â
Need I say more? I do want to hear your explanation and I do think the ‘play’ is at the heart of this issue. After all, replanting the sunken garden at Hestercombe would be a slightly sterile, decorative task. Question - did Christopher Lloyd overcome a similar handicap out of his sheer involvement and the history of his own association with his site? Or was he decorating? I believe he recognised the problem and his limitations, though I’m not sure many other people do/did - and this is close to your tensions, isn’t it?
Â
Ok, to your definition - I read it and think, yes, of course, all those influences and, of course, a process, theatre is good (if you include the play.) And then I think where does a single vision, unencumbered, fit into this? I am once again (as fantasy designer) overwhelmed, as I was at your website. Overstimulated, unable to focus - where is the play? Can you have a brilliant play written by committee? I notice too that you ask of your designer/gardener that they include - what was it? mystery and some other things? Do they need any more constraints???
Â
In fact, the whole thing revolves around fascinating questions of constraint (inflicting the paths? what budget? whose garden?) and integrity (whose garden? whose vision? does it matter if you have a dozen inputs or is it better the more limited these are? is the analogy a play, with playwright,(!) producer, costume designer, audience &so? or is a better analogy and garden produced by the model of a novel? with only novelist, editor, cover designer - and reader who can shape nothing? How do you create a coherent whole in a garden, without the designer/gardener totally at the helm, to further mix metaphors?
Â
And then I end up asking - does the garden matter at all? or just the debate? And in what proportions? If it fails (? ok - what that??) and the result is a mess or disappointment to you, is it still a success for the discussion it provoked? or was the bruising by an unfriendly and loud garden world too much?
Â
I’m so glad that you have spread your wings beyond the garden world for your judges. You made me aware that I am the only designer/gardener amongst the thinkingardens group (though Stephen would contend that maybe) - and perhaps that is our strength. Add Tim Richardson as our external guru and you have another one. But we need to know of many more to spread our wings, with as little to do with gardening as possible - maybe you’ll be able to help us there?

I am amused (and more than a bit ashamed) that, with all the technical flourish of the Foreign Office Architects presentation, we didn’t offer a scale.
Â
Perhaps it is no wonder that half the world now responds to the cleared site by saying it’s smaller than anticipated and the other half by saying the opposite ?
Â
The internal area of the Walled Garden is apparently 3095 square metres, or 33,300 sq feet. I’m away at the moment; as soon as I am back we will measure the length of the straight wall and post it. People can work out a scale from this.
Â
On your other questions: one can certainly envisage a design approach that calls for any of the features you mention (and many others). At this stage I would be doubtful about a proposition in which the design detail, built quality, or cost, of any such features was a critical part of its presentation. That is, WHERE to put a viewing platform, or a bench, say, is the important question; my experience of building anything is that if one gets this right then all the other issues can be resolved easily, appropriately and within an overall budget.
Â
Two other things: we will certainly be including guidelines on budget in the competition Brief by the time we get to the detailed specification for the shortlisted competitors. These last are the ones whom we expect to pay to develop full-blown planting schemes. In this context, I would favour a ‘whole-of-life’ approach to costing that tries to combine the capital costs with longer term maintenance. (There is an exchange with Kim Wilkie on this topic in the archive material on the website).
Â
The other thing is that the Foreign Office scheme is of course intended to keep to a minimum what is actually built. During our discussions we made a very definite decision that their intervention would be limited to the laying out of paths and not, for instance, to rearranging the contours in any way. One could easily conceive of a gardener or designer’s approach that sets out to subvert,or oppose, Foreign Office’s research; but the intention is that it should be quite hard to ignore.
Â
Does this help?
Â

What is the scale of the plan shown?
In a planting design what will be the budget?
To what extent can applicants include costly design features such as viewing towers\pergolas\seats\ brick walls\ponds\sculpture\ pleached trees ect?

I do think this plants focus is unnecessarily limiting, and it does seem from your comments on Petra  that you are well aware of what can be achieved with other materials. Martha Schwartz is not definitive, merely one practitioner.
Â
A focus on ‘naturalness’ is limiting too, of course - and even more the idea that gardens as ‘natural’ should be self referential. Why would anyone limit what a garden can express to something to do with ‘nature’? I don’t see sculptors making sculptures of chisels.
Â
And, of course it helps if the sculptor knows how to use their chisel and their chosen medium, and the garden designer their plants and other materials. But best for them not to be predominantly obsessed with the materials and medium or they will (do?) disappear up their own fundament - in this case for lack of any other interest.
Â
Which is perhaps why Noel and Michael Pollan go off in those kinds of directions. The mainstream garden world offers little alternative to full time garden writers with active minds and interests. Some of the rest of us are fighting for greater range and expression in gardens.