This blog is an effort to capture my thoughts on gardens, landscapes, and the manipulation of.

Its an aid memoir rather than educational, but like many designers I find it hard to switch off when I leave the office, and as a codger the ideas, if not captured, tend to dilute by the time I come back to them for any practical purpose.

My mind is constantly running with ideas, and needs to be emptied on a regular basis before it becomes to cluttered. In the past this have been in various note books or devices which, somewhat like my life become scattered around and seldom returned to, other than when we move house or decorate, an unearthed notebook will have me sat on the floor for hours.

The blog, collecting together ideas by theme, seems like the perfect tool to pool these thoughts and re use them in daily practice.

I will produce a brief history or biog as a separate post but in short, I’m a garden designer who trained as a landscape architect, worked many years in this sector and finally returned to garden design. I have been lucky enough to work with, collaborate and in some cases just listen to some of the best designers in the world and they have shaped my craft and honed my ideas so that I feel I should now be giving rather than sucking up the good advice I have been passed over the years as well as trying to add my chapter to the living story.

One of the main ideas I would like to develop through this and will become a constant re edited theme are four states of experience that I feel all gardens offer, or should offer and as designers it is up to us to develop and portion out the space we are given to character and arrangement but I have found these four themes are constantly re occurring in my designs So I started looking for them in nature and low and behold there they were.

In my earlier work at Battle McCarthey I came across a professor Julie Herwaggens research a project on sick building Syndrome and the potential beneficial influence of landscape. Proff. Herwaggen had researched peoples desk environment looking at us as developed animals rather than intellectuals, and as such the potential for stress and anxiety from an animalistic point of view, this was my earliest step to thinking of environment and landscape as a primitive experience challenging on the simplest of levels.

Later working with Tom Stuart Smith he drew my attention to his theory of prospect and refuge. Similar to Julies he based garden designs on that simplest of basic survival principles our earliest savannah living ancestor must have prized, the ability to prospect for food along with the need for shelter and safety.

I enjoy the simplicity of these ideas, the landscape to me has always been a developed efficient organism and the simpler the theory the more likely its is to be right.

I love looking at the landscape as a whole seeing people as just another accommodated organism living in a niche rather than the idea that we create our environment, we adapt to work with it.

Since these early days I have continued to think in this manner reading philosophy along with subjects from the natural world to understand the animal as well as its environment.

I have come up with the first of my conclusions the four states principle mentioned earlier, which I will use the early part of this blog to develop.

These themes are;

THRESHOLD OR ENTRY – mind change

AMUSEMENT – engagement with

REFLECTION – escape

ADVENTURE – spirit

Along with all this theory I will talk about gardens I have made and others I have visited, landscapes I have experienced, books and people who I think of as inspiration and other formats or ideas that have, and continue to influence me.

I apologies now, although I do not expect anyone out side my small circle to ever read these indulgences should you have happened across it or a topic chimes with a university project I strongly urge you to spell check every thing first before you lift it and re-appropriate, my spelling, diction and general English is terrible so please feel free to edit as you see fit.