As a student and perhaps even before that I was aware that designed gardens would rely on the surrounding natural or managed landscape to complete there composition. This is often used to create that element in design which I have called earlier in this blog “adventure”.

This idea of the borrowed landscape has been long employed to make the garden have a more far reaching appeal to the observer and make the owner feel they have a greater connection into the world beyond.

In more recent, contemporary gardens I have noticed that the borrowed landscape is illustrated less from the observable land beyond the site, although this of course makes its contribution, but instead takes its core design leads from the surrounding landscape, bringing the motifs of agriculture, silviculture and where it still exists the natural world into a managed and polite garden space, for people to enjoy.

I’m sure this is a conscious decision on the designers part, but even if happy accident In viewing at what first look like very human interventions and trying to understand their success as a design It has made me observe the landscape around me more closely at both Macro and micro levels.

What first led me on this mission was seeing the simple grass curling strips of Piet Oudolfs garden at Scampston hall. The garden is walled and therefore has no real need to rely on the borrowed landscape, by their very nature the walled garden can shut out the world and create a land of its own, but something about these lines of grass made me feel connected to the countryside I knew so well.

After some time I started to think some abstraction of contours, in some way this horizontal landscape had created the hills and vales of the Yorkshire countryside it sat in but the representation felt stronger than just abstracted lines from an ordinance survey map and felt like it represented more than just the landscape form but also the life of that landscape.

It wasn’t until I was travelling to work one morning passing out of Petworth and making the first great stretch of countryside before I got to the next conurbation, a journey I have done for the past three years. Looking over the Shimmings Valley out from Petwoth I saw the cut hay lying in neat lines along the contours of the up slope, drying out and waiting to be baled.

There I saw the curved lines of Piets garden, there I saw the contours of the valley illustrated on the hill like a giant installation of Christo proportions. and this art display is put on every year and i have never noticed.

This is the new borrowed landscape to me, this is taking some of the motifs of what we are surrounded by and abstracting them for a garden situation, the landscape is bleeding into the garden unlike the style of lancelot brown represented in the same town at Petworth house a grand rolling landscape running up to the house and complimenting it in scale simplicity. a straight romanticised copy of the countryside.

If this was my first revelation the next came soon after, when I saw the field ploughed, there again were the contour lines marked onto the hillside through tractor tyres which earlier may well have collected the hay from my Eureka moment. Then again in the corn, the tractor once again leaving an impression responding to the earth it traversed.

Not only did I see all these things for the first time on the thousandth time of looking I saw the landscape for the first time as well,

Now I continue to look at what I take for granted in the landscape everyday and I find wonderful things, and these things I bring into my design to evoke the feelings they bring out of me in their natural homes.

I started, nay titled this piece the contemporary approach to the borrowed landscape but of course this is the oldest piece of non design in almost every garden. The square of lawn surrounded by a swathe of flowers at the edge and contained by a hedge or a wall or a fence looks very similar to the field with its flower rich headlands and rich grazing.

Perhaps I just need to look a little deeper.