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Personal Note Archive April 2007

 

April 2007

Regent's Park

The weather is warming up now, the blossom is on the trees, all the historic gardens are opening for business. Gardens represent many things, but perhaps most of all they represent peace and happiness. In many mythologies human kind was at its happiest living in a garden. H.G. Wells turned this ideal around in his book The Time Machine when he imagined a journey into a future where all problems had been solved. The world he imagined was set in a garden, filled with pleasant little Eloi people who did nothing much, and couldn't concentrate on anything for more than five minutes. Without problems there was nothing much to do. It is thought the garden world Wells imagined was actually based on Kew Gardens in Richmond. If you go visiting gardens you might want to remember these two very different views of a garden. Personally I enjoy gardens. And walking in them, rather than trying to forget about my problems, I try to just think about them differently. Hopefully that way I'll maintain my powers of concentration for a little while yet!

Continuing our theme on gardens we visited the beautiful garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex. In 1910 Nathaniel Lloyd, bought Great Dixter, and commissioned Edwin Lutyens to restore the fifteenth century house and design the gardens. The garden in which the restored house sits with apparent naturalness, is ironically very characteristic of the twentieth century. There is a combination of formal and informal. These themes are divided into garden rooms, in an architectual style. Hedges are used to create doorways and even corridors. Outbuildings are themselves incorporated into the garden, developing this theme of a harmony between indoors and outdoors. The house itself, weathered and mellowed by centuries of rain, wind and sunshine, seems to sit organically in the landscape. The result is a house which was built in an age when nature was something to shut out and hide from, sitting in a garden where nature is venerated. There is a popular view that we are less in tune with nature than we used to be, but in this garden, this idealisation of our relationship with nature, the opposite seems to be true.