Bougainvillaes taking over the Stupas

Originally uploaded by Tüshar

I came across this attractive photo and wise caption on Flickr. The Archaeological Survey of India (AIS) was set up by the British in 1871 and it looks as though their gardening staff still do apprenticeships in Britain’s parks departments. Great Indian works of art are treated with lawns, rose beds (Hybrid Teas preferred) and Bougainvillea - a native of South America. One could argue that Sanchi, as the best-oldest Buddhist site has had a massive influence on garden design, and therefore deserves this treatment. But I would rather use the photo to argue that there is an enormous need for garden designers and landscape architects to become involved with appropriate design for archaeological sites. It is far too serious a matter to be left to the whims of archaeologists, garden managers or tourism ‘experts’.

I came across this drawing of the Buddha’s birthplace recently and it reminded me what a cruel thing Kenzo Tange did at Lumbini. Like Corbusier, Tange was a gifted designer and a terrible planner.

An ability to design objects (eg buildings) sometimes goes with an understanding of outdoor space, and gardens, but in the case of these two leading architects from West and East it did not. ‘Baroque Buddhism’ is as unwelcome as ‘Baroque Communism’, in politics and in design.

The illustration shows the scene which Fa-hsien described in c400 CE:
“Fifty li east from the city (ie from Kapilavastu) was a garden, named Lumbini, where the queen entered the pond and bathed. Having come forth from the pond on the northern bank, after walking twenty paces, she lifted up her hand, laid hold of a branch of a tree, and, with her face to the east, gave birth to the heir-apparent. When he fell to the ground, he immediately walked seven paces. Two dragon-kings appeared and washed his body. At the place where they did so, there was immediately formed a well, and from it, as well as from the above pond, where the queen bathed, the monks even now constantly take the water, and drink it.”

PALACE Residences. - There is no gentleman’s house in the west of Scotland, that, in its present state, can properly be, denominated a palace residence; but Drumlanrig, from its commanding situation, the extensive territory belonging to it, and the wealth and rank of its owner, we shall here consider as of this class. We feel the more justified in doing so, from the extensive improvements now carrying on in the grounds, and which will, doubtless, in a short time, be extended to the house. Nothing can exceed the dignity of the situation of this edifice; placed on a knoll, on the summit of an advancing ridge, backed by an extensive range of wooded hills and mountains, and commanding, in front, and to the right and left, as far as the eye can reach, a varied surface of corn and posture land, watered by a considerable stream which skirts the margin of the park, and terminating in hills of heath and pasture in the horizon. To whatever side the eye turns of this extensive and magnificent prospect, the whole is the property of the Duke of Buccleugh. As this property now exists, in a general point of view, there is little for the landscape-gardener to do, except forming two new approaches to the house, a new kitchen-garden; and modifying, by planting and by some changes on the surface, the park and pleasure-ground. An excellent kitchen-garden is already walled round, and the gardener’s house, about to be commenced, we were informed, will be the first in Scotland, not only as a commodious and complete dwelling, but as a specimen of cottage Gothic architecture. The designer of the garden,. Mr. Hannay, is the present head gardener at Drumlanrig; and the architect of the house is Mr. Burn of Edinburgh. As far as we saw the new line of approach, it did not appear to us at all satisfactory; because we could not conceive how the ascent to the house by it could be rendered either easy to travel over, or agreeable to the eye.

Judging from a hasty glance, we should say that the best way to procure two approaches of perfectly easy ascent, and descent, of great beauty and variety in the views seen from it, and of striking effect on arriving at the house, would be, to commence two or three miles to the right and left, and to lead from the present public road, a private one, on a uniform but very gentle slope, along the side of the range of hills at the back, or what is, we believe, the south side of the present flower-gardens. We would there form a court-yard to the palace, instead of the present one on the western front, reserving the extensive prospect from the north front to be obtained by the stranger first from the windows. As pleasure-ground, we would follow up the present style of the place, and form such additions and variations as would place two ranges of terrace-gardens on each side of the east, west, and north fronts. The beautiful terrace-gardens already existing show with how much effect this might be done. Whether we might not change the course of the river in some places, or produce ramifications from it, in such a way as to show more water from the palace windows, we did not take time enough to consider; but, at all events, we think we ascertained the practicability of diverting a part of its waters in such a way as to produce a powerful waterfall in one place, and a lake in another. We have great pleasure in stating that the flower-gardens were in the highest order and keeping, and the grass edgings to the walks entirely to our mind. Mr. Hannay we found fully concurring in all that we had said on that subject in our October article.

Some instruction, as well as amusement, may perhaps be obtained by the reader, from the perusal of what the celebrated William Gilpin said of this place, then called Queensberry House, in his Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty in Scotland, &c., published in 1776. “The garden front of Queensberry House,” he observes, “opens on a very delightful piece of scenery. The ground falls from it, near a quarter of a mile, in a steep sloping lawn, which at the bottom is received by a river; and beyond that rises in lofty woody banks. All these objects are in the grandest style, except the river; which, though not large, is by no means inconsiderable. It is amazing what contrivance has been used to deform all this beauty. The descent from the house has a substratum of solid rock, which has been cut into three or four terraces, at an immense expense. The art of blasting rocks by gunpowder was not in use when this great work was undertaken. It was all performed by manual labour; and men now alive remember hearing their fathers say, that a workman, after employing a whole summer day with his pickaxe, would carry off in his apron all the stone he had chipped from the rock. How much less expensive is it, in general, to improve the face of nature, than to deform it. In improving, we gently follow; in deforming, we violently oppose. The Duke of Queensberry of that day, who carried on these works, seems himself to have been aware of his folly. He bundled up all the accounts together; and inscribed them, as I have been informed, with a grievous curse on any of his posterity who should ever look into them.” (p. 84.) The other observations made by Gilpin on this place are excellent, as, indeed, is all that he has written on picturesque beauty; always, however, making allowance for his almost exclusive admiration of that kind of beauty.

[Ed. The above post was written by John Claudius Loudon in 1831. The photograph was taken in 2008]

John Claudius Loudon concluded his 1831 visit to Drumlanrig with the alterations quoted below. Following upon my own visit in 2008, I would also like to proposed an alteration. It is shown in the illustrations of the lower terrace. It appears from the patterning of the grass that an elaborate parterre once filled the space. My proposal is to re-create the old bedding pattern with a wild flower meadow, as shown on the collage. It could be done by the simple expedient of ploughing the land and sowing a different wild-flower mix each year. The result, I believe would be beautiful, good for butterflies and a popular new attraction for Drumlanrig.

“Of all the alterations which we should wish to make on the grounds at Drumlanrig, there is none that strikes us as of half the importance as that of forming new approaches. There is one now going on; but a more preposterous under-taking of the kind we have seldom or never witnessed in any country. An attempt is made, or was making in August, 1831, to ascend a steep acclivity directly in front of the house; a still more hopeless task than that of cutting the rock into terraces, above related by Gilpin, by the old Duke of Queensberry. The duke did succeed, and the terraces were formed, and now exist; but this approach never can form an easy ascent; and we maintain that, even if it did, it would be in the very worst taste imaginable in the given situation; for this specific reason, that it would show all the striking beauties of the spot before entering the house. Now, we hold it to be a fundamental principle, in laying out grounds, that the grand beauties of every situation should be first shown to the stranger from the drawing-room windows. If this be not a fundamental principle, we should be glad to know on what reasons either the situation for a house is fixed on, or the direction of a road to it islaid out. There are many points in which a stranger taking a cursory glance at a place may be mistaken; but, if he has his eyes open, he never can err in forming an opinion as to the approach. As to the terraces we certainly have no wish to alter them. At the time Gilpin wrote, terraces were common, and the great rage was for nature and the picturesque. That rage has now subsided; and in landscape-gardening, as in architecture, and in other arts which combine beauty with utility, reason is the governing principle.”

The remnants of Barking Abbey in their landscape setting are beautiful and memorialise an incredible period of Essex history. A continuing interest in local history is not just important for those citizens who derive their sense of identity from the area, for history buffs or lovers of heritage. History gives many insights into global climate cycles which are important to us all now and can help planners construct a longitudinal view of land and climate relationships;

“High tides again in 1409, sweeping through or over the river walls, flooded 600 acres of meadow in Dagenham marsh, and destroyed 120 acres of wheat in another marsh. “

Source: BBC website.

Gardenvisit.com was launched in October 1998. So now we are ten! Unlike many ‘Dotcom Frenzy’ websites, the aim was not gold. Feeling a little smug about having the text of my 1986 book on English Garden Design since 1650 as a computer file (rolled on from BBC format to MSDOS), I wanted to do something with it.

Like Ted Nelson, I was attracted to the idea of a hypertext publication in which readers could chart their own routes. This was done by putting in hyperlinks from the 1986 text to pages about specific gardens and biographies of designers, painters, patrons etc. Another aim, still only partially achieved, was to bring together the histories and theories of garden design and landscape architecture.

The first book I wrote was about both these subjects. But when the publisher dropped out I could not find a replacement. Other potential publishers told me that it should be two books and this is what it eventually became: one on English garden design since 1650 and the other on Landscape Planning and Environmental Impact Design. Both are now available on the Gardenvisit.com website, together with about 25 other online eBooks. I continue to edit content for Gardenvisit.com, no longer as owner-manager, and other topics have sprung from the original content: Garden Tours and Garden Design/Products. They are linked by a concern for Context-sensitive Design, which has become a main theme of this Blog. ‘What know they of England who only England know?’, asked Kipling (see Sukh Mahal). Travel induces a love of places, a context-sensitive design approach - and a need to visit ever more gardens!
Having been too serious for a birthday, here is my Grandad’s favourite garden joke:
Vicar, looking over a hedge: “Ah. What a wonderful job you and God have made of the front garden”
Parishioner: “Ah. You should’ve just seen it when God had it to ‘imself”

An email arrived today with the comment that ‘My primary interest is in design excellence (aesthetics) & I have been writing about how architecture is an art, and unlike other fine arts it is a practical art: a public art.’ But that ‘… because of the demands of sustainability there needs to be a way of re-thinking how we do architecture, privileging design. Central to this idea is that architecture is functional (modernist programme), sceniographic (post-modernist) and meaningful (post-postmodernist agenda)!?’

I agree that architecture and landscape architecture are applied arts. But in this, they do not differ from garment design, furniture design, etc. All should be functional and are best when they have high aesthetic quality. Sustainability considerations apply to each of these arts: if the world is running out of resources then we need to be more economical. This is, amongst other things, an argument for using lime mortar instead of cement mortar. Lime bonded brickwork and stonework can be disassembled, allowing design changes the the reuse of materials.

The public aspect of some applied arts raises other issues. The furniture in my home would seem to be entirely my own concern. But if I want to build a tall modern building in a medieval village then this becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. Ditto for the Martha Schwarz post-modern amhphitheatre in Castleford, especially because a bunch of idiots dipped their hands into the public purse to fund the park.

‘Meaning’ is another issue. A modernist approach to the Castleford Park would have been to discover what people wanted for the space and then make provision for their activities. The postmodern approach, as used by Schwarz, was to give the space a ‘meaning’. I do not know what words she used - could it have been to ‘echo a Roman approach to open space design, as exemplified by the Colisseum’ - but they must have been something inappropriate. A post-Postmodern approach to the Castleford park would have involved recognition of the multifarious interests of local people combined with intelligent design leadership. Beliefs shared between the public and the designer would have facilitated their combination. Flying in a US Design Queen might have worked in the context of shared beliefs.

Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, England, is managed by the Kew Royal Botanic Garden. The valley is a beautiful rhododendron garden and the lake at end of the valley is very beautiful. But the horticultural section of the garden is amateurish. The horticultural standard is fine but the design standard is, well, too horticultural. The bog garden is a case in point. It was made by the Horticultural Team between 2001 and 2003. The planting is OK but the construction design is a disgrace to the name Kew. As the photograph shows, there is a lumpen retaining wall with ‘crawling snail’ cement pointing. As my granny would have said ‘Its horrid’. And look at the bottom edge of the photograph. There is a cheap gray plastic pipe which is used as a ‘water feature’. Even toilets don’t have water features like this. They employ plumbers. Wakehurst place should employ an expert garden designer to make occasional visits and give a professional opinion, much as Dame Sylvia Crowe used to do for the UK Forestry Commission.

The University of Greenwich has re-done much of its paving with resin-bound gravel on its Maritime Campus. It has one the most scenic campuses in Britain and certainly needs to be ‘paved with care’. But was resin-bound gravel the best choice?

Some of the pedestrian paving, usually adjoining buildings, is done with a beautiful riven sandstone. It comes from Yorkshire and has the local name Yorkstone. This is an excellent material. Other pedestrian paving, often running through grass areas, is ungraded gravel. This too is a good choice, though it is hard to fathom why they used granite instead of the local flint.

Most of the new paving on the campus is resin bound and uses a small-diameter flint gravel aggregate (2-4mm). For the central roadway this was a good choice. A bitumen macadam basecourse supports the weight of vehicular traffic. But the road is used as much by pedestrians as by vehicles and it was well worth the extra expenditure on resin bound gravel to hide the bitumen.

But I can’t see the point of having used resin-bound gravel for purely pedestrian walks or for the new car parks: (1) it costs a lot more money (2) it is impermeable and therefore works against Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) objectives (3) it does not have that nice crunchy sound you get from gravel (4) it looks phoney - like a plastic imitation of gravel (5) it is out of keeping with the historic character of the Maritime Campus - where unbound flint gravel is the traditional material.

Having long believed that good plant combinations are a key to successful planting design, I was pleased to get a copy of The Encyclopedia of planting combinations by Tony Lord and Andrew Lawson (Mitchell Beazley, 2005). They are both expert photographers and Tony Lord, who wrote the text, is a former Gardens Advisor to the UK National Trust. Unsurprisingly, the photographs are excellent - if not quite as excellent as one might have expected. Disappointingly, most of the text is about the individual plants. Since there are many books on individual plants, this could have been omitted. The plant descriptions are followed by remarks on plant combinations and, as one might expect from a pair of photographers, they have a good eye for line, colour and texture.

The most surprising thing about the book is the appalling standard of the introductory section on ‘The art of combining plants’. It reveals the author to have no understanding of garden design as a fine art and somewhat reminded me of books written in the 1920s. Take the opening statement as an example: ‘A garden’s beauty invariably comes from the plants that it contains, the way they work together, and the overall effect they produce’. Does this apply to the Alhambra, to Versailles, to the Taj Mahal or to Rousham? Of course not. A garden is a composition of five elements: landform, vegetation, structures, water and paving. If one element is strong and the other four are weak you will not have a truly great garden.

After this blinkered introduction, the first sentence is ‘Making a successful garden is a question of balancing what is already there with what is required of the plot’. But what IS ‘required of the plot’. The author does not say. The second section (p.13) opens with the sentence ‘Once any hard landscaping is in place, selection of the plants can begin’. Goodness gracious me! You should not employ a gardener when you want your central heating fixed - and you should not employ a horticulturalist when you want a design for your garden. Similarly, the UK National Trust should employ horticulturalists for horticultural advice and garden designers as gardens advisors.