Monthly Archives: July 2013

We welcome the Royal Baby and hope London's Greenway Network will have a King Queen Champion

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What are kings and queens for in the 21st century? I don’t know, but opening hospitals and attending state funerals does not seem ALL THAT useful. Gardenvisit.com is therefore putting in a pre-natal plea for the Royal Baby to become a patron of London’s Greenway Network. Princess Di used to run incognito in Kensington Gardens and I wished at the time that she had laid the foundation for a Scandinavian-style Cycling Monarchy. It would be wonderful if her first grandchild could lead London, as Henry VIII and Charles II did, in the creation of a London Greenway Network. It should provide for green transport and green recreation throughout London. Though welcome, Boris Johnson’s  cycleways are not places of pleasure. London needs greenways fit for kings and queens and royal babes.

Garden design ideas

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Garden design ideas point to  an overlap between the histories of garden design and landscape architecture:

  • Both disciplines relate ‘the works of man’ to ‘the works of nature’
  • Their design ideas and histories are inter-twined
  • They involve the composition of landform, water and planting with vertical and horizontal structures
  • They are concerned with what Norman T Newton called Design on the land and Geoffrey Jellicoe called The landscape of man.
  • They are influenced by art but differ from from ‘art’, because ‘designed’ objects have utilitarian functions. [If ‘art’ is regarded has having functions then they concern the mind more than the body – if one regards mind and body as separate entities.]

Gardens are better places for exploring design ideas than public landscape architecture, because they tend to be smaller, because they are less utilitarian and because they have private clients who often care more about ideas than impersonal public clients.

Design history is a rich source of ideas. But historical designs are best treated as timeless patterns of the kind advocated by Christopher Alexander in his book on The Pattern Language, unless one is doing on historic restoration or re-creation project. I find art-historical categories provide the best approach to the classification of periods in the history of designed gardens.  But nationalistic and dynastic categories also have their uses.