Nature talking with nature

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks has always believed in the importance of symbolism in garden art. Here, he explains how he has used gardens to interpret humanity's place in nature and the cosmos. Many of the illustrations are from the Scottish garden created at Portrack House in Scotland by Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick.

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It is usual, when believing oneself original, to reinvent the wheel. In garden art and thinking about nature this danger is particularly acute, especially in an ecologically-sensitive age. John Dixon Hunt, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a useful analysis, Greater Perfections--The Practice of Garden Theory, that reveals how one designer after another reinvents a logical truism: that there are three fundamental natures. This tripartition is a trap lying in wait for unsuspecting garden designers who, like God, intervene in the world of natural laws and unfolding evolution trying to make nature or the world into a better place. Yet it is also a very suggestive way of thinking about design that can be added to and perhaps altered. What are 'natures 1,2,3'?

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The first is wilderness, the undomesticated wild that was common in the age of hunter-gatherers; the second is made up of productive fields, orchards and farmyards, among many Neolithic inventions; and the third consists in what is historically-speaking relatively recent: gardens, pleasurable places where art and thought are brought to bear on nature. 'Nature thinking about nature' the last type might be called, in so far as we consider ourselves a part of it. Christians might consider themselves separate from this realm for obvious reasons: Darwinian nature can be cruel and wasteful; sunscts, flowers and crystals can be vulgar and kitsch. But, on the whole, Homo sapiens since the first cave paintings has tried to relate itself to the cosmos, and understand it. Nature worship, 'biophilia' as E. O. Wilson calls it, and curiosity about the universe, are hard-wired into our species even as we know that natural selection is 'red in tooth and claw'.

Hunt's title is gently polemical. Gardens are a Greater Perfection than architecture because, in the words he quotes of Francis Bacon from 1625, they are the culmination of a civilizing process: 'When Ages grow to Civility and Elegancie, Men come to Build Stately, sooner than Garden Finely: as if Gardening were the Greater Perfection'. Today a cynical age would misunderstand his message as 'you pay for the building first and then if there's any money left it might go towards a garden or landscape', a vile idea.

Hunt shows how 'the idea of three natures' has underlain landscape design since the sixteenth century and been reinvented, consciously or not, ever since. Cicero, apparently, first described second nature as sowing corn, irrigating soil, farming generally and damming rivers. But it was not until the golden age of Italian gardens that 'third nature' was explicitly added to the corpus making it a kind of evolutionary progression from primitive wilderness to functional agriculture to aesthetic communication with God's work. It was a schematic evolution that we still follow today, from the age of hunter-gatherers to the Neolithic revolution to the age of great civilizations. For instance, one can follow such a progressive route at the Villa Lante near Viterbo starting at the wild park and then moving down the cascade to culminate in the sixteenth-century present, the ornamental fountains and the iconography of the Cardinal who commissioned the layout. That was an Italian version of progress. In 1541, Jacopo Bonfadio among others, coined una terza natura, as nature improved by art, and subsequently many designers so conceived it. The aerial perspectives of the Medici villas, the grand vistas of Louis XIV, the planning of English country houses show this sequencing of nature as seen from the architecture (2). Usually, unfolding from the house, it procedes from 'nature 3' to '2' to '1' (ornamental garden to domesticated fields to far wilderness), but any combination is possible and even when the English convention for 'naturalness' or 'informality' appears to dominate, a mix of types is usually smuggled in. The point is this tripartition is logical as well as epistemological and evolutionary: nature divides naturally into the untended, the functional and the intended.

The trap

So it is no surprise that, when lecturing and designing, I fell unwittingly into the trap. For a soon to be abandoned railroad track in Scotland that Network Rail can no longer use, and the bridges along it (2nd nature), I envisioned a set of small mounds (3rd nature) surmounted by shrubs left to go wild (that is, 3rd nature becoming 1st) (4). Old railroad cars will be filled with soil, put on the disused track, and have holes punched in the roof so trees can grow through the ceiling. A Surrealist dream of ageing industrial artefacts juxtaposed to living nature, and each treated as evolving, interacting beings has been around for generations. The project is under way and not very original except in the polemical oppositions of machinery and growth (as I shall explain).