Category Archives: Garden Design

The Alnwick Garden, Jacques Wirtz and Tadao Ando

35 Replies

Alnwick Castle Garden

Does Alnwick have the greatest garden made in the twentieth century?

Most of the people I have asked find the Alnwick Garden very disappointing, as I do. The Telegraph reported in 2003 that ‘The Duchess of Northumberland has launched a scathing and bitter attack on “bitchy” and “snobby” gardeners in the south in a riposte to critics of her lavish £42 million “people’s garden” at Alnwick. The Duchess, whose garden has attracted 300,000 visitors in the past four months, making it the third most popular in Britain, said that she was dismayed by the sniping since starting the renovation project seven years ago’. An exception to all this ‘snobby’ and ‘bitchy’ criticism, quoted on the back of Ian August’s book on The making of the Alnwick Garden, comes from the Mail on Sunday. They called it ‘The grandest garden to be built in Europe for more than 100 years … a visionary landscaping project’. Coming from further north, I feel entitled to regard the Duchess as a snobby and bitchy southerner!

My view is that Jacques Wirtz is a good designer but that most of the work was done by his sons. I believe one son holds a qualification in landscape architecture from what is now the Erasmushogeschool in Brussels, and was regarded as a weak student. The other son is an agricultural engineer. Caveat emptor. The Duchess made a big mistake in not appointing Tadao Ando, who was invited to Alnwick. Ian August’s book reports the conversation with Ando. He said ‘”I want to design this whole garden myself. In my opinion, there is no great garden designer alive today” – this sitting next to Jacques Wirtz – “and no great garden has been built in the last hundred years”. We sat, stunned. The insult to the Wirtzes was worse for being so casually delivered, but Ando seemed oblivious’. The simple truth is that Ando, who trained as a carpenter, not an architect, is a great designer and, with help, could have done a really great job. Instead of this, the Duchess has what might be a display garden for an upmarket garden centre and ‘leisure attraction’. The lesson is that a good client, when ‘stunned’ by a good designer, should pause for thought. A week’s meditation in a hotel designed by Tadao Ando might helped to concentrate her mind.

Housing landscape architecture and planning

24 Replies

Would you rather live in the top row or the bottom row?

Would you rather live in the top row houses or the lower row houses? The top row gives you central heating, indoor toilets and no rising damp, no earwigs and few spiders. The lower row gives you peace, beauty, calm and sustainability.
The obvious thought is ‘Why can’t I have both?’ Well, perhaps you can, and modernising the lower row would probably be easier than de-modernising the top row. I think something went terribly wrong with the system which lays out new housing estates in the UK. The architecture is mundane but liveable. The external landscape is ghastly: too much roadspace, too much wasted land, too much impermeability, too many planning regulations, too much ugliness, too much engineering, too little sustainability, too little landscape architecture, mouldy little strips of ‘garden’. We need a housing revolution. The vested interests which control the system should be treated better than middle eastern dictators, but overthrown. Though not innocent, I do not see the motor car as the villain of the piece.
Images of British housing estates courtesy of : lydiashiningbrightly dkohara jimmy_macdonald

Cabbages, flowers and other vegetables in a cottage garden

Garden design for modernist architecture: Le Corbusier and Patrick Gwynne

29 Replies

Gardens at Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Patrick Gwynne's Homewood


Le Corbusier cared deeply about greenspace but liked to view if from afar and above. He was not an enthusiast for gardens, as can be seen from the Villa Savoye. It has an attractive roof terrace but is plain old grass at ground level. Many of Corb’s British admirers shared his views and gave little attention to gardens. Patrick Gwynne was a notable exception. The Homewood was designed shortly before the Second World War and its garden was dug up during the war to make space for growing vegetables. This would have made it easy for Gwynne to lay a Corbusian lawn but, over the many years he enjoyed his beautiful house, Gwynne gave much attention to making what is best described as a classic example of the Gardenesque Style. From a theoretical standpoint, it does not seem the right thing to have done. But which of them to you think had the ‘correct’ attitude to gardens? And which house would you rather live in?

What should be done with the Gadaffi Golden Fist Crushing American Jet Statue from his Tripoli compound?

4 Replies

What should be done with the Gadaffi Golden Fist American Jet Statue

What should be done with the Gadaffi Golden Fist American Jet Sculpture?

Delighted to see the approaching end of the Gadaffi regime, and having offered an urban landscape idea yesterday, I am wondering how garden designers could help today. One idea is to invite suggestions for what to do with Gadaffi’s respond Golden Fist Crushing American Jet Statue (the Bab al-Azizyah Tripoli compound, where it stands, was stormed a few hous ago). The thinking behind my suggestion is (1) it was a pity that so many statues of Marx and Lenin were destroyed when the Soviet Union fell (2) I like the way London handled a similar problem, by putting a statue of Charles I at one end of Whitehall and a statue of the man who secured the removal of his head (Oliver Cromwell) at the other end of Whitehall (3) history’s monsters should be reviled but not forgotten.
So my suggestion is to place Gadaffi’s Golden Fist American Jet Statue in a garden, to show it is harmless, and to treat it as a rejected toy viewed by frightened children. They would be adult-size plastic scultpures, to symbolise the fact that dictators are plastic-ey overgrown kids. Other ideas welcome.

Garden image courtesy susan402

Make it extraordinary

3 Replies

What makes the setting of a town extraordinary? What makes a development extraordinary? What makes a garden extraordinary?

Is it the subtlety of colour? Is it the unexpected? Strong formal qualities? A sense of fun? Or a location to die for?

Or the delight of the whimsical? Or recognition of the familiar?

Just what is the X-factor that makes a design extraordinary?

Parks managers, parks police and polite gardeners

8 Replies

Expert gardeners should maintain good order among plants and people in public parks and gardens

Expert gardeners should maintain good order among plants and people in public parks and gardens

I had a chat with a gardener in one of London’s Royal Parks this week and he was a nice a man as you could meet anywhere. He loved his work and he loved the visitors who admire his work. Talking about a park user who seemed troubled, and who he tried to look after, he remarked that ‘One thing I know for sure is that whatever you do in this world – you get it back tenfold’. His idea was that she must have treated some people badly and now she was experiencing the consequences. Anyway, he was such a nice man that it made me wonder about the park administrator vixen who shouted at Tian Yuan with the help of a portable PA system. I think it is wrong to have separate administrations for gardening staff and policing staff. Instead, they should give the gardeners more training and more money and more responsibility – and smartphones. If they have serious trouble they should film what is happening and call on support from the real police. The video could be recorded in the police station in real time. The advantages would be (1) the public tend to love and respect good gardeners who make beautiful places (2) there would be less expenditure on parks police – and less aggro to park visitors.