Text 12. A cosmogenic Park landscape

 

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Can a garden capture the imagination and at the same time reveal the dynamic nature of the expanding universe? Charles Jencks, a distinguished architectural theorist and declared postmodernist is convinced of the fact: “There are many different takes on this plot, equally worthy of architectural representation, and they concern the shift from the view of a static cosmos to a creative cosmogenesis. Characteristically, architecture represents this unfolding in two ways: by signifying aspects of the changing and growing world directly (its laws, seasons and qualities) and by reflecting them abstractly, in new languages of architecture (or inventive moves in an old language).”

Behind the concept of cosmogenesis is Jencks’s view that the universe, contrary to the traditional models provided by religion and science, is not a precise mechanism, but a process whose history is shaped by creative, surprising organizational leaps. In his 1995 book The Architecture of the Jumping Universe the American architect explains his fascinating theories, which he has taught at distinguished schools of architecture in Britain and the USA.

In the rough, hilly landscape of Dumfriesshire in southern Scotland, Charles Jencks has been creating an extraordinary private park for about ten years now, in which the insights gained from his academic analysis of complexity theories take shape in earth formations, sculptures and garden motifs. Until her death in 1995, Jencks’s wife Maggie Keswick, a renowned expert on the history of Chinese garden art and geomancy, was not only fundamentally involved in redesigning the 120 hectare family estate, but developed new forms and metaphors for the history of the cosmos, working with her husband, and supported by academics and artists. This produced a strange combination of Chinese design elements and motifs from chaos theory and cosmology. The Symmetry Break Terrace, a lavish terrace in the terrain in front of the house, is a visual metaphor for the important organizational leaps the universe made as it emerged: from energy to material, to life and finally to consciousness.

In terms of horticultural history, the terrace is part of the Earth Dragon of Chinese tradition, and also reinterprets the classical ha-ha, a step in the terrain that is invisible to visitors, used in traditional English landscape gardens to give the impression that the gardenblends seamlessly into the landscape of wood and meadow. In Jencks’s garden two retaining walls in natural stone undulate into each other to form this sophisticated boundary element. Its continuation, and thus the metaphor for the last organizational leap to the stage of consciousness, is in the form of a trimmed yew hedge enclosing the house on the rise in a wide sweep. If you follow the path down from the house to the wide valley of the River Nith, you reach the walled Physic Garden, near a large greenhouse.

Jencks dedicates this kitchen garden, which Maggie Keswick designed functionally in the traditional way, to human DNA and the six senses – six, not five, as he adds intuition as man’s sixth sense, and enriches the garden with sculptures and coded sayings. Four large aluminium sculptures symbolize the DNA double helix and represent the sense of taste, hearing, touch and intuition, as mentioned. The senses of sight and smell are represented figuratively as a larger-than-life nose and a cave with optical installations. The plants in the beds, which are framed by low box hedges, are such that stimulate the particular senses. So the sculpture for the sense of touch is surrounded by thistles, stinging nettles and stapelia, while the earth hollow that visitors can walk on around the nose is planted with aromatic plants like oregano, lavender and thyme. The DNA Garden is not so much intended for the cultivation of kitchen herbs as for an aesthetic approach to allembracing knowledge, and it is not surprising to learn that Maggie Keswick was an occasional guest of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Little Sparta, which is only a few hours’ drive away.

The creative and conceptual abundance of the DNA Garden is pleasingly balanced a few paces away by breathtakingly shaped mounds of earth and grandiose expanses of water. Their composition is reminiscent of the 18th-century, classical English landscape garden at Studley Royal. From the top of the Snail Mound, a grassy cone of earth about 15 metres high, you enjoy a wonderful view of the landscaped garden, fringed with trees and shrubs, and the surrounding Lowlands. The companion piece to the Snail Mound, climbed by two spiral paths that paradoxically slope downwards at times, is the Snake Mound. This S-shaped wave of earth about 120 metres long and made up of elegantly placed loops of earth encloses the three Slug Lakes, placed in the landscape like mirrors of the sky.