Alice Rawsthorn to Mary Keen
We met briefly at the Museum of Garden History debate last month on
the commissioning of the new garden at Hadspen House.
I have written a column on the controversy for the International
Herald Tribune, published on Monday -
2007/07/20/arts/design23.php - and a longer version of the column is
to be published in the New York Times on Thursday.
As I was very interested by your comments at the museum debate, I
would very much like to know your views on the following:
AR: What are your misgivings about the process of commissioning the
new Hadspen Garden?
MK: I think the initiative is tremendously exciting. Please say that, as I think Niall has started something really interesting. Nothing wrong or novel about competitions for
gardens. They certainly exist and this one is a cracker. I hope
he gets the response he deserves. But I work as a garden designer
and landscaper and would never accept a commission to plant a
garden that had been laid out by someone else. (Although having
said that, one of our most successful recent commissions has been
the restoration of a Grade I Lutyens house working with Peter
Inskip.) Garden designers are more than exterior decorators.
Planting to a prescribed layout would seem to us like painting
by numbers. The whole place is what interests us, how it feels,
the atmosphere of the garden or landscape, but a degree of
pragmatism is vital. You need to be down to earth. The materials
we work with - time, weather, plants and space, all change and
develop as no other art form does. Gardens are also kinetic. You
move through them. I think, but I may be proved wrong, that we
are right to insist on the fact that those who understand what
making a garden involves will always be the best people to design
gardens. Of course there are total plantspersons who make bad
whole gardens and those who understand space and restraint who
also make bad gardens, because they do not know how to handle
plants. The best designers are the ones who hold the balance
between both these needs.
AR: Could there have been a better way of handling it? If so, what
would that have been?
MK: Not a better way because Niall has listened
and changed the brief and has agreed that the design as well as
the planting can be the creation of the competitor. The FOA path
layout was pretty impossible. Try walking in a series of hairpin
bends on a slope and see what it feels like. I am sorry I did not
have time to put in an entry. Too much work and any way I am a
judge. But I did have the germ of an idea to reflect on the
elements that seem to me to matter about the Hadspen Parabola.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more.