This is an article that appeared in last month’s Garden Design Journal in their ‘Talking Point’ opinion section. 

I love to travel by train, because of certain negatives – because I hate car traffic and airports and because I’m too tall to fit into the aeroplane seats that I can afford. There are also distinct positives, such as the ability to watch the gradual changes in the landscape between cities, to have the luxury of time to contemplate those changes, and also to peer into so many back gardens. The orderly world of the surveyor’s geometry is often quite obscured, and all of the different scales at which the landscape professions operate are possible to easily comprehend from the train, nested into one another. Buildings, too, are viewed differently from the train, as their frontages rarely face the rails. All of the lumpy structures that accommodate the lives we actually live, rather than the face we show the world, are in evidence in the view from the train.

These higgledy-piggledy back alley perspectives, seen through murky windows, also serve as an allegory for the interrelationship of the landscape professions. Connections are haphazard, boundaries are unclear, some areas are derelict because no one can figure out how to put them to profitable use, but still the whole messy ensemble somehow manages to form a coherent setting in which people are able to operate more or less effectively.

Garden designers, landscape architects, planners, and architects all manage to get on with their jobs despite the disputes at the boundaries and the prejudices and misconceptions that we hold regarding each other’s work. Our relations could be so much better, though, and perhaps the way to this is to ask what the landscape needs rather than what our professions need – and what we need to know to work with it. This requires framing our knowledge carefully so that we help each other to understand all the various elements of landscape work. Some of these elements are obviously shared and fun to talk about, like plants, but other issues are more convoluted and difficult – issues of society and communities, class, the construction of green infrastructure, public and private space, and so on.

I had hoped, when I began to write this piece, that I could demonstrate that what divides landscape architects and garden designers is not scale, or plants, or any particular, but rather that garden designers work largely for private, often wealthy clients, whereas landscape architects tend to be employed on public projects. Simple. Garden designers are right wing, landscape architects are left wing, and never the twain shall meet. The desire, however, to make a simplistic and provocative point that might raise a few hackles and start a few conversations, is thwarted by the fact that this simply isn’t the case.

I have come to realise that the greatest divides between professions of all sorts (the divide between landscape architecture and garden design is merely typical) are caused by the fact that all we understand how to do what we do, but few are able to put their work in context in the broadest terms of geography, history, politics, and sociology alongside the scientific aspects of our work.

Neither landscape architects nor garden designers have historically been very good at thinking and writing critically and contextually about their work, but landscape architecture in Britain has been getting much better in recent years at doing so. Architects are good at criticism, but often hostile to context – and context is what they most need to come to terms with, especially in our cities.

A lack of context is what leads to assumptions such as that landscape architecture is a subset of architecture, and that garden design is a subset of landscape architecture. Certainly the areas of practice overlap, but the realms of knowledge required for each role are vast, and vastly different.

The cure for the prejudices that plague our professions and hamper our work lives would begin in education. Architects need to be taught not just by architects, but by garden designers, landscape architects, civil engineers, planners, and so on. And the same is true in any other combination. We can’t hope to understand each other without teaching each other. Garden design has a unique situation amongst these professions in that it is most often taught on short diploma courses. We need far fewer of these very short courses and far more full degrees in garden design, and all the way to Master’s level. We must take garden design as seriously as we take landscape architecture and expect practitioners to be as highly qualified.

Finally we need far better communication and collaboration between our institutions in order to protect and promote all land-based work because it is all under threat. Landscape management has all but disappeared, for example, and it needs the combined might of  the whole sector to rectify this problem. Highly skilled horticulturists are often treated – and paid like – unskilled labour, which again is a tragedy, but also a problem for all of us and for the landscape. We must put our collective energies to solving this problem.

Those of us who work on the land are all part of the same murky picture, and we must begin working towards bringing that picture into focus in education, in our institutions, in our collaborations, and in government policy.

Through landscape our professions have immense power to re-envision the practice of everyday life to effect more sustainable human behaviour and habits of occupation and land use. This is why it is powerfully important that garden design is treated as both an intellectual and an instrumental profession, and one that operates alongside architecture and landscape architecture as a natural equal – and all of these professions has considerable work to do to make that happen.

 

The superlatives of contemporary expression reach as far as possible to the extremes of human experience. The sheer awesomeness (or awfulness) of everyday life leads us to select descriptors such as ‘epic’ or ‘iconic’ for every object or environment or atmosphere we encounter. An offhand internet search for ‘iconic pencil sharpener’ and ‘iconic toilet’ yields pages of results. If everything is to storm us with shock and awe then either we will begin to live in a state of permanent exceptional transcendence or we will merely cease to give a damn. I submit that the latter is far more likely, and that the sublime has been rendered banal.

There are, of course, biblical injunctions against such fevered hyperstimulation and hubris, as evidenced by the myth of the Tower of Babel. In this story of pride’s punishment, the tower’s erection and subsequent collapse is the classic parable of the consequences of overreaching. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s two surviving paintings of the tower from the mid-1500s show it as an inexorably ascending spiral, its mountainous bulk contrasted against a typically low and waterlogged Flemish landscape. The cities Bruegel would have known would have been dominated by Brabantine Gothic piles such as those found on the Grand Place in Brussels, thus it was probably politically apt for him to represent Babel in the Romanesque style, taking a lesson from the past rather than rendering arrogance as a particular problem of his contemporaries.

Bruegel’s versions of the Tower of Babel are sometimes described as referencing Rome’s Colosseum, but this is a simplistic comparison. Of course this comparison may be made, but its real representational strength is that it is a monstrous hybrid. It is part grim fortress, part cathedral, part theatre, but it is also a mountain, freakishly misplaced, and an obsessive piling of rocks into an expression of the urban sublime. The mountain is a sort of madness of the genius loci, or perhaps a cancer.

Bruegel’s magic mountain is a mythical one, but there are plenty of extant examples of buildings that have radically reconfigured landscapes throughout history. Various groupings of pyramids  echo montane forms, such as those at Giza in Egypt, Teotihuacan or Palenque in Mexico. Later structures such as Borobudur or Angkor Wat accomplish much the same trick. The Bayon at Angkor Wat, its spiritual omphalos, represents the multi-peaked holy mountain upon which the gods dwell and which forms the axis of the universe. The function of any of these buildings was surely to induce awe.

There are, of course, real mountains that are sites of sublimity and that glow with spiritual significance such as Mount Kailash in Tibet, Mount Fuji in Japan, Kenya’s Mount Kilimanjaro, or Australia’s Uluru. There is definitely a certain something to the combination of singularity, difficulty of access, and the many metaphors triggered by the act of ascent.

A combination of technologies including the elevator and the curtain wall have allowed cities to create skylines that recall mountain ranges, and certain buildings can serve as key ceremonial peaks within those ranges. In film, the Tower of Babel is the name of the building that serves as the focus for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and that other great twentieth century dystopian film Blade Runner consciously quotes some of the scenes of the Tower, aligning film history and myth along the axis of the western cultural universe. Manhattan’s Pan Am Building, though less graceful than Lang’s visions, also fixes an urban streetscape through sheer force of height and bulk. The World Trade Center towers did the same for the whole of Manhattan’s skyline until they volcanically expressed the sublimity of terror in September 2001.

The World Trade Center site, with its enceinture of faceted curtain walls around the twin pits of the National September 11 Memorial strikingly resembles the caldera of a shield volcano such as that of Ball’s Pyramid in the Pacific Ocean to the east of Australia. So, eerily, do other major towers of our day such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Ryu-Gyong hotel in Pyongyang, or London’s Shard. The church steeple pitches of their facades emphasise their improbable eruption from the surrounding city.

In the past few years there has been a curious rash of magic mountains proposed for various European cities that merge techniques of building and landscape architecture and which also mash together images of the urban sublime with that of the wilderness. Given the increasing propensity of contemporary governments to throw money at big signature projects instead of management or multitudes of small, meaningful projects, it may simply be a matter of time before someone builds one. The three proposed mountains are (in chronological order) as follows:

The Berg, Tempelhof, Berlin, was proposed by architect Jakob Tigges. Ringed with mist and Nazi architecture, it would rise to a 1000 metre height so that aerial perspectives of Berlin usually only attainable through aviation could be gained. The blog Pruned wrote in 2009, “The proposal is not a serious idea, admits Tigges; rather, it’s a provocation to use the site for something other than mediocre apartment buildings.” http://pruned.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/mountain-tempelhof.html

Die Berg Komt Er (The Mountain Comes), the Netherlands: 7.7 billion cubic metres of sand would be required to build this mountain to a height of two kilometres, presumably to park an ark should a flood necessitate it. Feasibility studies have shown that the mountain would probably have to be constructed as a hollow building because of the extensive impact of its weight upon surrounding ground levels. The proposal was mooted in 2011 by Thijs Zonneveld, a journalist and cyclist, and the architecture firm Hoffers & Kruger has created renderings.  http://diebergkomter.nl

Mount Copenhagen, Denmark. Writers Mik Thobo-Carlsen and Kaspar Colling Nielsen first dreamed up the idea 12 years ago, but first aired the idea around the same time that the Dutch mountain was first proposed. The Mount Copenhagen website states that it will be “…3.5 kilometers high. It will have a circumference of 55 km, take 200 years to build, and cost in the area of $120.000.000.000,-“ http://mountcopenhagen.com

The last, Mount Copenhagen, might take generations of work to complete, as did so many of the monuments of the landscape sublime mentioned so far in this article. If any of these were to be built, would they become the sacred ruins of the future? Would they be icons of wilderness or of architecture? Are these proposals delightfully ridiculous or merely banal?

“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here I ruminate on hanging baskets.

 

Let’s imagine a scenario. You’re out walking on a sunny day and the streets are full of colour and cheer.

You might even be whistling. You’re transported with delight, until your mood shifts suddenly as you feel a cold trickle down your neck. You’ve walked under a freshly watered hanging basket. Instantly you’re reminded of just how much you loathe hanging baskets. Your mood darkens as you contemplate the vulgar annuals, the enormous wasted expense, the extravagance with water, the unsustainable use of peat in potting mediums. People could be doing something useful with their time instead of planting these damn baskets! The sky has blackened with clouds, and you can hear distant thunder. Petunias. Bah!

The US-based Project for Public Spaces, however, exhorts us to ‘start with the Petunias’ in its Eleven Principles for Turning Public Spaces Into Civic Places, ‘Short-term actions, like planting flowers, can be a way of not only testing ideas, but also giving people the confidence that change is occurring and that their ideas matter.’ Hanging baskets and other floral displays are more than just ‘quick wins,’ though. For many local authorities they are not just a way of demonstrating commitment on the way to a sweeping solution, but they are consistent, everyday ‘wins’ that are a visible show of continued care and action.

Many years ago, when I was working for Rummey Design, we took a field trip to see the Coventry Phoenix Initiative, a sparkling regeneration project that our practice had undertaken. It was crisply executed and studded with public art and architectural features; a typical display of the showers of New Labour largesse characteristic of the time. Right in front of the BBC’s spanking new office and ill-fitted to and overhanging the angular stone stairs were a series of bulky stainless-steel planters filled with showy annuals. There was no doubt about the fact that these shipwrecked planters looked tokenistic next to the cool and sophisticated design, but on the other hand, could the local authority be faulted for wishing to decorate its new civic rooms?

In a way, organisations were simply moving in and becoming inhabitants, much as one might hang pictures in a new house.

What is the answer, then? Do we continue to specify hooks on lamp standards so that ‘pimp my street’ bling can continue to be applied? Do we try our best to ignore it? Do we legislate against the pelargonium? Actually, as I write, my window boxes are filled with the most garish pelargoniums I could find, and it pleases me to hear people pause and comment. Recently a fashion photographer posed a model in front of my planters. A windowsill is a natural place for a bit of decoration, and a window box is a token of pride and ownership and a gift of beauty to one’s neighbours. We need to include a few windowsill equivalents in our landscape designs, but also to use our skills to rethink display planting. Freiburg im Breisgau has wreathed many of its central streets in wisteria, for example. Arching over the street, it has much greater public meaning as a sign act of beauty and fragrance than it would climbing a private building.

It is important to contemplate what the sustainable, contemporary equivalents of display planting might be. We should, for example, incorporate the WSUD technology of flow-through planters in our streetscape designs. The answers may well emerge from much of the valuable research that has gone into green walls, living roofs, and other such technologies. These have yet to fully connect with the daily civic life of the street. Let’s start by rethinking the petunia.