RESIDENTIAL-You are the Garden

[Scott Thomas Murison]

I don’t think I’m alone in my enjoyment of reading maps. For centuries they have been works of art and articles of adventure . We can use maps as analogies for our own journey through life, an anthropo-cartographic form to our experiences within the context of events that have shaped us. Some people don’t believe their lives are worth mapping whereas others write memoirs or become subjects of biographies.

These maps can be useful to others; friends, family, healing professions, priests, social historians and the reading public as examples. What I am proposing here is that our personal life experiences can be important when making a garden.

What is the purpose of a garden? What is its context in our lives? Can my life experiences, expressed in my garden, contribute to my future in a meaningful way? Some memories we wouldn’t want to retrieve but there are others that could arouse hope or provide a platform, metaphorically, for what vision we may have for our futures. Even touching an archaic nerve may provide strength to persevere in difficult times.

Nevertheless, the requests many clients make for gardens are those which are emulated in much of the media, accumulated images of what is desired by others. There is little room for an expression of authenticity because there is no expectation that the designer will make an empathetic enquiry into the client’s life story. In any case, the process and outcome for authenticity, the discovery of ‘our deepest possibility in the world’ could be too revealing to express publicly and in a garden. However, it may not be something people other than the client can raed. The garden may functuion on an aesthetic level as well and again not necessarily be beautiful to enrich the user. The work of Schoenberg comes to mind.

Could this type of garden arouse some emotion like music, film, books, art, children or even some architecture does? Could our own garden transport us? I would like to think so.

In our age we might look for feedback after divulging something of our inner selves to make a garden. References derived from a life narrative may induce reflection whereby stresses become more navigable and cues remind us of something significant even something yet to be resolved. We move from the givens; plants, garden structures, art, access, spaces, sustainability, water, sunshine, shade, food and wildlife to play, culture, travel, passions, personal history, suffering, aspirations and so on.

To conclude, can a garden achieve a lot more for us? The designer as interpreter and empathiser, the client as the garden and the garden only a map of an inner life. From this perspective we can talk about metaphor, meaning, subtleties and contemplation where imagination, function and climate change become but shorelines to a marvellous land. And if we throw a little more of our understanding of life, in particular our own lives (or our clients’ lives) into our gardens we might, as Kant suggests, stimulate more free play with our imagination and increase not only their aesthetic integrity but also their capacity to console and excite us.

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