Postcard from Japan: The home team

No doubt the home supporters among you have been wondering how the Brits got on.

There were two gardens from British designers at the Gardening World Cup, by Jo Thompson and Richard Miers, both quite different interpretations of the peace theme.

Actually it's slightly cheating including Jo in the British contingent as she was representing Italy (James Basson, too, is a candidate for the Brit team, being an Englishman who lives in France). She comes from Italian stock, so she's allowed to defect temporarily, but she's on our side really.

Anyway, Jo won a silver medal (equalling her medal from last year's show) for her stone-arched garden, taking its inspiration directly from what happened at Nagasaki almost 70 years ago.

Richard, making his first show garden here (now that's a baptism of fire if ever there was one) was awarded bronze for his very English garden that simply embodied the everyday peace we all feel when we kick back and relax of an evening in a beautiful garden.

I thought I'd shut up for once and let them talk about it in their own words.

 

Jo Thompson: The Butterfly Effect

"The garden is a direct response to a visit last year that we made to the Nagasaki Peace Museum... It really sunk home quite how important this message [of peace] is.

"What stayed with me were the images of these atomic shadows, which are the remnants of people who were essentially vapourised by the bomb. The people have disappeared but their shadows still remain on the concrete walls: you've got somebody sitting waiting for a bus, a ladder with a man up it going about his daily business - and all of that is just spine-tinglingly awful and it does make your blood run cold.

"Then next to these shadows were some wooden window shutters which had survived, and onto them there had been imprinted the shadow of the acer leaves on the tree that had stood in front of them, and it was beautiful, the most intricate pattern.

"And I found myself standing in front of it thinking, well this is beautiful but in fact it's come from something so ugly. And I wanted to use that.

"So that was the first idea - and then as we walked out of the museum we were met by a host of butterflies. It was extraordinary - we came out from this place of gloom and were just met by them flying around, their fragility contrasting with the sadness of the place we'd just been.

"So I've designed a space that has rendered walls for shadows, it's a very plain, simple floor surface for shadows; it has arches in it to frame shadows, and plants that attract butterflies."

Richard Miers: Serenity

"It's a garden to entertain in: to get people to sit down and have a meal and discuss and talk, aiming for peace and tranquillity.

"The theme of the whole show was gardens for peace  - my interpretation was peace within oneself, which you get being out of doors in a nice garden with wildlife all around you, the sound of the running rill - it all just helps you bring peace to yourself.

"The Japanese love asymmetry, and Europeans tend to like symmetry, and I wanted to show them what an English town garden could look like.

"I wanted to bring elements of water, I wanted to bring in the sun, represented in Emily Young's sculpture, and show them how an English herbaceous border would be put together but using Japanese flowers.

"It's getting the rhythm around the garden, having the space to breathe between the flowers which I thought was important."

Avant gardening #2

The erudite and charming Tim Richardson got in touch with me after my earlier post about my doubts over "conceptual" gardens and so I've been having a very absorbing chat with him via email about what is, and isn't, a garden, the relationship between gardening and art and many other thought-provoking questions.

In case you've had your head under a hedge for the last few years, Tim is a stalwart champion of modern garden design, and the author of Avant Gardeners, which as I told him I have on my Christmas wishlist. He's kindly let me reproduce his thoughts in response to all my ditherings, since I thought they cast far more light on the subject than I ever could.

On whether conceptual gardens are actually gardens...
"I know what you mean about the 'garden' definition but in some ways for me it's like the discussion as to whether gardens are 'art' or not. Quite interesting but a bit of a cul de sac -- perhaps the definitions are not so important after all? In a way we need to call them 'gardens' because calling them 'art' or suchlike would be like trying to jump up on the coat-tails, like a puppy dog, of something supposedly 'higher' up the artistic hierarchy. We should be able to rise above such matters! Perhaps art should aspire to the condition of the garden . . . [faced as we are with a global ecological conundrum, I am not joking]"

And on garden history and modernism...
"At risk of sounding like a self-publicising lunatic, on the Jekyll gardens thing -- sometimes people imagine I am some kind of iconoclast dedicated to smashing down 'old' ways of horticulture [a recent letter to Garden Design Journal said I should be made to crawl on my belly all along the A road to Beth Chatto's garden and pay homage..] but in fact I think I am only qualified to make any suggestions having made a serious study of 20th c planting styles, to be found in an earlier book: English Gardens in the 20th Century, which includes a reappraisal of Jekyll as an avant-garde artist coming from the Aesthetic rather than Arts and Crafts tradition. That book is a decade by decade, careful evaluation of the development of planting styles -- so I am not in any way 'against' plants, which is what yet another leading designer [good -humouredly] accused me of only the other night. But designers are not always very interested in historical matters I find.

"For me, future potential can only be discerned via knowledge of the past; the two go hand in hand. But it is surprising how little crossover there is between contemporary garden/landscape design and garden history."

Those who stick their heads above the parapet unfortunately get shot at, generally speaking. But I for one am very glad we have people like Tim to make us think, and occasionally move forward from time to time.

Avant gardening

I've been a bit preoccupied with Very Modern Gardens lately (just for something I'm writing).

By this I mean what's rather meaninglessly called Conceptual Gardens by the RHS. What exactly does "conceptual" mean anyway? Aren't all gardens conceptual - it's just that sometimes the concept is more usually Gertrude Jekyll than Mondrian...?

Anyway - I've always really enjoyed the Conceptual Gardens section at Hampton Court. They're not only fabulous works of art: they also really challenge what you think you're seeing and how you think you see it. Did anyone see Forest² by Ivan Tucker? All those silver birch trees surrounded by mirrors. And the wonderful experience of looking through the holes in the sides only to see your own disembodied face staring back at you, floating somewhere in the air among the trees. And as for Ecstasy in a Very Black Box... This really challenged, with no plants but a load of baby lettuce but probably the best evocation of what it must feel like to be a manic depressive that I've ever seen.

So - I'm thinking about all these gardens which are thoughtful and thought-provoking, based on skeletons or what it's like to be a parent or autumn or, in one case, the Electric Sheep screensaver, and I'm wondering what exactly it's all meant to be about. I love it as art: much as I love going to Tate Modern and having all my ideas about the way things are turned upside down.

But the middle-aged lady in me says, would you have it in your back garden? I think it's rather revealing that the champion of avant-gardening, Tim Richardson, recently confessed to Gardens Illustrated magazine that his own garden was full of hardy geraniums. Constance Spry roses and kids' bikes. I wonder, if Tony Smith offered to come along and paint the whole thing black and put multi-coloured shards of glass in it, whether he'd take him up on it?

I suspect I'm just missing the point here. But I kind of wonder, sometimes, whether there is a point. It may be art - but is it gardening?

End of term

I thought you might like to see my model...

No, it's not a random collection of toilet paper, cotton wool and lollysticks, but a state-of-the-art 3-D representation of a town garden. Oh, all right then, it is a random collection of the bits other people throw out, but I had a fabby time putting it together.

This was the grand finale of the Capel Manor Drawing & Graphics course, which finished today - or rather, today was the deadline for handing in the coursework, which I managed by the skin of my teeth (was frantically cutting up chopsticks with my Felco no 9s over breakfast to make the pergola legs). It wouldn't win any prizes, but it's such a long time since I made anything like this that I just had a blast.

The whole course has been a bit of an eye-opener, in fact: can't believe it's finished already, it's gone so quickly. I discovered that I'm not all that good at drawing, though can turn out a passable stab at something recognisable if coerced: but much to my surprise, I do really like graphics, especially the pen work which is fiddly but very satisfying. I think it had a lot to do with being able to see the point of things - being a very prosaic sort of person, I could happily sit for hours drawing Very Precise Circles for planting plans whereas I got a bit impatient with all that painstaking shading and "just let yourself free" arty-farty stuff.

I was reading a recent issue of Gardens Illustrated (one of my favourite magazines) which has a column by the novelist Frank Ronan in the back (ashamed to say I've never read any of his novels, but he can sure can write about gardening). One of his last bon mots on the subject of "what is a garden" was "The gardener starts with a plant, not a pencil."

Precisely.

All change

I'm having to say goodbye to my weekly gardens at the end of the month. I've been offered a peach of a writing job which I can't really say no to - but something has to give, and it's the gardens that must go, sadly.

Not that I'm giving up gardening - no sir. I'm still doing my "big" gardens - those projects I'm working on involving an element of design or re-working. And then there's my own garden, which I'm cooking up a scheme for - involving more exotic plants than I strictly speaking ought to give houseroom for (but I just want to have a go at growing them).

It's a great opportunity for me, but I must admit to a bit of sadness as I trim hedges and weed borders for probably the last time. You get to know gardens intimately when you spend hours every week there - and you kind of forget they're not yours. So it's a wrench to leave them (and I keep thinking things like "I hope whoever comes after me keeps up with the mulching..." or "I must do that overgrown Philadelphus before I go or it'll never get done".

It's hard to let go.

Drawing conclusions

I've spent a lot of time drawing lately.

Last night I was drawing an onion. The other day it was my hand, closely followed by a large director's chair on a table.

What this has to do with gardening I'm not quite sure - but all I know is it's great to be the one nicking the pencil sharpener out of the kids' art box for a change.

It's all to do with the Drawing and Graphics course I've now started at Capel Manor. Lovely teacher, great fellow students (all of whom are well into gardening so I now have lots of new friends to discuss the pros and cons of coppicing eucalyptus with), and I'm learning a great deal about negative space, tonal drawing and the value of a 4B pencil.

Can't quite see the connection between director's chairs and garden design yet - but am willing to suspend my disbelief for the luxury of being given permission to draw pretty pictures and call it work.

Crossing over

It's not often you find a gardener who's a designer. Or, for that matter, a designer who will readily admit to being a gardener: the best ones will usually be keen gardeners in their own gardens, but professionally there's not much cross-over between the two.

As time goes on, though, I'm finding the lines are becoming increasingly blurred for me between professional gardening and designing. I've had two regular clients ask me to design their gardens, or bits of them: one is a clear-ground project which will probably take years as we're doing it mostly by hand; the other is a perfectly good garden at the moment which they're about to rip up for an extension, so it'll need a re-work afterwards.

What's more, a designer I sometimes work for as a gardener has now asked me to help her out and design part of two of her clients' gardens - they've asked for veggie gardens and she doesn't know much about vegetables.

So all of a sudden, I find myself being a professional gardener and a designer.

Well that got me thinking. I actually really enjoy designing with plants - not so keen on the concrete and garden furniture bit, but love the idea of putting my favourite plants together so that they really sing. I've started to wonder if I might be able to break the mould a bit, and wear two hats at the same time - professional gardener, and plant designer.

To that end (and so that I'm not entirely talking out of my backside when asked to do these projects) I've signed up for a college course at Capel Manor College in London. This is one of the better design colleges, and to its great credit has a garden design course that concentrates solely on plant design. I'm starting by learning how to draw (never a great strength of mine) - first lesson at the end of next month. Wish me luck!