Creating a garden is, initially, an introverted process. It takes a while to imagine a garden and to develop it into its final form. For much of that period your thoughts are just part of an evolving dream of a future reality. It takes longer to build a garden and a whole lifetime, or more, for that garden to mature. To embark on making a garden is an act of faith. The creative journey is made unique by the relationships we have with those we enlist to help us. Without other people there would be no garden. Together, we generate a great alchemical soup of ideas, we consider constraints and we discuss details that ultimately coalesce into the new garden. Landscape gardens can express themselves in myriad ways. I have always enjoyed the freedom landscaping offers to explore what the land, the people and the circumstances ultimately reveal.
A country garden by Jinny, with a backdrop of a mature trees against the Georgian stable building
Recently, and seemingly in response to increasing warnings about our effect on the planet, gardens appear to be having an identity crisis. Evocations of an imagined lost wilderness peppered with wildlife are at the fore in contemporary garden culture, while gardens with perspective and order seem, for now at least, consigned to history. Any form of art or innovation seems shamefully wasteful of natural resources, as though we have forgotten, briefly, about our impending fate. What on earth are we doing? This ‘ hair shirt’ hubris about how we gardeners alone can offer a mea maxima culpa to the earth seems odd. With our eyes raised imploringly towards heaven are we wriggling ourselves off the guilt hook?
A small orchard of pear trees in one of Jinny’s projects
English gardener and author
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