You know, one would have expected that what was being asked of competitors became more and more defined as the process evolved; instead there has been a relentless opening-up of opportunity. It is now open to put forward a proposal without plants, and to ignore the Foreign Office path layout. The competition is open to anybody with ideas, and not just gardeners.

Your letter makes something else clear, which is that it is not just the internal space of the Walled Garden that is at issue. Indeed, it would be perfectly possible to make a response to the walled space by proposing an intervention outside it.

I believe, and have said elsewhere, that the garden can become a kind of alternative focus on the Estate, and within the landscape, to the Main House; and I do see what happens in it and around it as in itself suggesting a design approach to the broader landscape.

Put this way, I am perhaps saying something very radical indeed.

As far as access from the House goes, this won’t be entirely clear during the Open Days. In essence, the Walled Garden can be approached along the straight ‘Peach’ Walk, parallel to the long wall, above the rectangular irrigation tank. Alternatively, from the parkland below, past the copper beech, the square pond and the old dog-kennels.

Both routes do ‘offer’ a logical existing point of entry to the Walled Garden, but you know me too well to think that I would find this logic (necessarily) binding!

An immediate and abiding concern is whether the parabola, in your mind, is essentially an autonomous project or part of a global plan for Hadspen. Do you have your own ideas about the eventual lines or rhythms of approach to the garden? Are you imagining the winning design will be strong enough to exert its influence outside the walls? Even so, there needs to be a reciprocal influence from the outside in, which, for the ultimate success of Hadspen as a whole, needs to involve more than the dialogue with outside horizons visible within the garden. In particular, it is damaging to leave the liaison with the house unclarified.I do not mean that link needs to be straightforwardly continuous. But now is the moment for sorting out in your mind how to prevent it remaining a somewhat confused no man’s land. It worries me that contestants may never have walked directly from the house to the parabola. Will this be possible for them on the open days? One cannot finally love a space sufficiently in isolation from the company it keeps. This is maybe a counsel of perfection, and a complication which at this stage you could do without! But it bears directly on the scale of opprtunity that, under your guidance and dedication, Hadspen perhaps uniquely affords.

Most of us today garden within a horizon of threats to our gardens that we are only able to limit by the judicious use of screens and other defences. At Hadspen, there is no need to abbreviate spatial memory and promise in this way! This is indeed a circumstance to be respected. The whole notion of how much to put into or leave out from the parabola should depend on what is available to complement it elsewhere (I think this should count with you even if there is as yet no clear understanding of just which spaces will eventually be available to whom). There should be anticipations, confirmations, discrepancies, echoes between everything! Or that is how I need to work. But then I could never have organised so rousing and public-spirited a project as this, and I look forward to going on learning a lot from it in the coming weeks and months.

This is really helpful and I think does nothing to stoke the revisionist
fires. What are your plans for early August? It will be helpful, I think, to
have had gone through the entries with you pretty much first of all. As you
rightly surmised, the views in/views out question has become the critical
one. Let me know some dates that suit.

My reading of walled gardens, which has been taken up by Mark Laird at
any rate, is that they were the climactic event of the garden tour, and hence had a great amenity value, no matter what was grown in them. People wanted to see the size of their neighbours’ melons. This suggests that prima facie you would expect a good deal of ornamental growing in the walled garden, particularly of cut flowers for the house - typically a walled garden might be divided into four with espaliered or cordoned fruit hedges lining the main paths under-planted with fat borders for cut flowers etc. One would expect fruit to provide the framework for the garden. Sheltered beds, under south-facing walls etc.,would definitely be for early veg. though. I think you should be cautious of the revisionist rhetoric, there is no doubt about what, broadly speaking, was historically ‘right’ for the garden, your aim, I thought, was to set out to do something historically wrong.

NB The question in this letter was prompted by the discovery of the following in the Hadspen Estate notebooks:

1818 – laid out of flower ground anew

Johnny; a query, possibly a misreading. I think I am right in saying that your dating of the building of the D shaped Walled Garden at Hadspen is
based on a reference in the Estate notebooks to Remaking the Flower
Garden.

If this is the case, does this imply that the garden was used for growing
cut flowers for the house principally, but presumably with vegetables as
well?

I am interested for obvious reasons, and because currently there is a
strong revisionist rhetoric in favour of its being remade as a vegetable garden.
I am right in assuming, aren’t I, that it can never have had an
ornamental/amenity role?