Friday, July 29, 2011

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Forty-acre private garden in southwest Scotland designed by Charles Jencks, open to the public one day a year. The design is based on mathematical and scientific themes such as fractals, the Fibonacci numbers and the double helix.

This isn't really my thing, for two reasons. One, I have never been much moved by scientific symbols in themselves. Abstracted from the systems of reasoning and experiment that made them powerful, things like equations and diagrams of strange attractors just don't blow my mind the way they do some people's. I love science when it makes me understand things clearly and rationally, and that is not the feeling I get from looking at perfect spirals.

And, I like for gardens to be lush and full of flowers, not open and geometrical. This smacks to me of concept art, in the sense of art that makes more sense as an idea to be described in prose than as an experience.

But this certainly is interesting, and quite unlike any other garden I have seen. So if this is what the client wanted, why not?

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