I’ve now accessed your list of judges “too many and too distinguished to mention in a private letter to a friend” as Max Bearbuam wrote to Reggie Turner, I think (it could have been the other way around). What a collection. I’m honoured to be among them, presumably along with the blessed Bannermans,

What a charming and generous letter; and thank you for the engaging picture it offers of your life in retreat.

For the moment as you see, I am stuck with deciding which idyll it would be nice eventually to retire into. I just read a sympathetic interview with a former socialist mayor of Milwaukee (don’t ask); confronted with two signposts - the first reading ‘Heaven’, the other ‘Lectures about Heaven’ - he says that he would always choose the second.
 
Very pleased I will see you on the 27th, and perhaps some new knowledge can be created. Apart from the prospect of a tournee between the world’s most subtly feline architect and the great warhorses of the gardening Establishment, I am now convinced that my mother, confronted with my wayward taste, is determined to say in company (and as a kind of public duty), what she has refused to say to me in private. Stay for supper afterwards if you are minded and free.
 

Thanks for your stimulating breakfast fare. I am not skilled enough to retrieve all the attachments you have sent, and on Monday will get my part time London secretary to liase with you over fax numbers so that I can be fully informed ..I will also delve into the website. I am as it were retired from hurly-burly London life, but will be in London on June 27th and will plan to show up in Tradescantland. You have presented a noble stage and theme for wordgardeners,with room too for thinkgardeners. Since I am really living in Tangier this year,I shall not, [and anyway hardly ever am] be in London from late July to mid September, but will wise up on if and how I can help when I see you in Lambeth. I am well, I am very busy with local things, {early,and fatally infected], as church, school, dilapidated local gentry etc

I am in disgrace because I promised Julian and Isabel 10 days ago to write to you. They made a sort of condition of participating in the judging of my very odd garden design competition that you should be included in this role as well.
 
Actually, the moment that they said this it was clear that I should have asked you long ago, and I would be most grateful if you were to think about it. What I need from you all is to go through the initial submissions for the competition and simply identify any that you think merit further development or interrogation. You can do this at Hadspen or at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth any time from early August to the 15th of September, when we have promised to reveal a ‘long’ shortlist. Attached is a summary of the website correspondence to date, the structure for the submission of competition entries, and a list of the other judges involved. I am a little embarrassed about the list, but it does, remarkably, represent a very carefully mixed cocktail of a few locals who have been engaged from the start, and professionals of all stripes who have thrown themselves in to the argument. The complete correspondence is on www.thehadspenparabola.com.
 
Oh, and if you are around the 27th June do come to the Museum. We are having a party for the exhibition and a debate – no a Joust – between the hip architects on one team and the gardening establishment on the other.
 
Are you well? Have you retired?
 

The gauntlet has been left lying on the ground.

FOA’s scheme is not something that anybody is obligated to use in their submission; if they win on the first round - and go to the final six - they still do not have to use it in developing detailed proposals.

But what they suggest does have to be BETTER.
 
My view is that the scheme is a tremendous success whether it is developed further or not - in itself another garden in the space that has had as much currency and mileage in the world of gardening as the Pope’s ( or my mother’s) real gardens in the same place. Any proposal for the Parabola, or any real garden there, cannot now avoid commenting in some way on all three, but perhaps the FOA one is the most present.
 
Nicholas O’s piece is the clearest statement of how their proposal should be regarded at this point - it didn’t start that way of course, but has ended up so precisely because of the impetus it itself imparted to the debate (and because the debate itself was ‘encouraged’ to modify the design process).

Eventually the zig-zags were indeed overwhelmed, at least for now, by the competitiveness of the marketplace;  in the meantime we have been given the perfect tool for testing their quality (if only in retrospect), and not least because serious designers and architects now feel inspired to over-top them, and are competing.
 
I know this is a difficult progression to convey within the exhibition format, but it is fundamental to demonstrate that the whole endeavour was for me an enquiry during the first two years of its existence. The key question was how a designer is chosen, and what role he or she actually plays. It has become properly a search for the best designer only since we finally launched the Competition three weeks ago.
 

Just to clarify something…
 
Reading the website & on-line correspondence I obviously appreciated that there was to be a greater degree of flexibility about whether the FOA layout would be adopted or not, depending on the winning submission.
 
But reading your email below  it sounds more like the proposed layout has already  been abandoned altogether.
 
Can you confirm this - it would affect how the exhibition narrative develops
 

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.