Many years ago, my wife was browsing through a copy of New Eden, a quite unusual gardening magazine from England that featured contemporary and challenging landscape designs.
In this particular edition there was an article by Charles Jencks, a man who appeared to be as much a philosopher as a landscape architect (it turns out he certainly was both). The piece concerned a design he had created and built.
The things Jencks presented in those pages struck an immediate chord. Here was someone who had a science-based understanding of some of the underlying principles of form in nature, and in his garden he had expressed those understandings in a grand way, literally shaping the earth, as well as in the more normal creating of ponds and garden sculptures and tree-lined borders.
A book Jencks wrote on the garden was one of our favourites, and we always dreamed of one day visiting it in person.
I knew it was somewhere in Scotland, but strangely there wasn’t a commercial website for the garden, or even any link to the likes of the Royal Horticultural Society or the National Trust.
Instead, I had to read through garden design websites, such as the Top 10 Gardens in the World (Jencks’s garden was rated number 1). What I discovered was that almost unbelievably, this famous place was only open to the public one day per year, as part of the Dumfries and Districts Garden Ramble!
That’s quite a draw card for a local garden club, to say the least, and it’s said that as soon as the date of the ramble is announced early each spring, all 1500 tickets are snapped up within minutes. Imagine holding a local charity event to show off a few backyards, and then having landscape aficionados from around the world begging for permission to attend.
For landscape designers, though, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is part of the modern pantheon. And those sorts of people are prepared to go to extreme lengths to see with their own eyes what they’ve studied with such interest and amazement only in books.
One website I read suggested that apart from the garden ramble, the only real way to even get a glimpse of the famous place was to go out to a place called Portrack, and then drive along the hedgerows, climbing up on the car roof at several vantage points to get a peek.
So we decided, on leaving the Lakes District, that we’d drive into Scotland by way of Dumfries, and see what happened. Even if we weren’t able to catch any glimpses, we could at least say we’d paid a little homage to one of the world’s greatest gardens.
The road (actually a single lane) to Portrack certainly isn’t signposted, and as it turns out Portrack isn’t really a village or even a hamlet. It’s the name of the farm that belonged to the family of Jencks’s beloved late wife, Maggie.
There’s no official “point of interest” sign for the garden on the main road, and when you get to Portrack there’s nothing to even suggest there’s anything famous on the farm. No “keep out” sign, and no “please enter” either. Just a typically overgrown grouping of trees and hedges, and a nondescript set of three driveways.
This was pretty much as we expected, and so we followed the instructions I’d found on the Internet, driving along the lane that appeared to border the farm. The hedgerows were very high, at least 3m in many places, and behind the hedges there were often large, heavily-foliaged conifers.
We did find one place, however, where we could make out a faint white image through a hedge that had probably been clipped just a bit too much. So I held my camera high above my head and took a few pictures. There was certainly something there, all right. A set of logs, stripped of bark and painted either black or white. But that was about all.
We drove further down the road until it became obvious we’d reached the end of the property, turned around, and this time went very slowly back up the lane. It was then that we saw a man standing out on the farm road right in front of the entrance to the three driveways.
We slowed and he nodded, and so I rolled down the window. My wife leaned over, and asked very politely, “Is that a private road?” “Aye”, he answered.
Not getting anything further, she tried again. “Is there a famous garden down there?” “Aye”, came the reply (the Scots always being frugal, most especially with their words).
My wife had one last go. “Is it open to the public?” “Aye”, he said, and we both felt a flutter of excitement. “It’s open one day a year, but I’m sorry to say you’ve missed it.”
We knew we’d missed the big day, by several weeks in fact. And besides, how would we have gotten tickets to one of the most sought-after garden rambles in the world? But the fellow must have seen the way our faces lit up, and then dropped. We were just about to say our goodbye’s, when he said (for the first time without being prompted), “How far ha ya come, anyway?”
We told him New Zealand, he mentioned that he had a friend down the road who hailed from Christchurch, we talked a bit about the earthquakes, and then he pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, adding, “my father’s the head gardener.”
And so it was that speculating cosmically, two travellers from the other side of the world found their stars perfectly aligned. We were given permission, and with it one of the most memorable travelling experiences of our lives.
Going through the gates, we walked along the top of the property, following from the inside the hedgerow we had tried to photograph over when we drove along the road. Only this time we could see the sculptures as they were meant to be seen. They really weren’t that awe-inspiring, but that didn’t matter. We knew full well that there was a series of truly wondrous things to come.
And come they did, as we walked down through a very wet valley. Around a corner appeared a bridge, but a bridge like you’ve never seen before. Everything was in curves; even the fence to keep the sheep out swooped on an angle that seemed almost impossible.
The bridge connected a woodland with a small set of shaped, manicured grass mounds. The mounds, where they met the surrounding ground, formed a natural curving path, and following the path around the corner we came upon what we knew had to be there – a set of hills and valleys and ponds and trees, as magical and brilliant as anything you’re likely to see in any garden anywhere.
Again the mounds were all made of mown grass, and again, you were drawn, almost as if there were magnets, to follow the paths made by the curves as they literally swirled to the pointed top of the hill.
Everywhere you looked, as you turned and turned your way up, your gaze was captured by a new shape, so unreal and yet (because it was a garden and everything was green), so real at the same time.
At the top, the ponds revealed their complete design; a twisting whorl, like a vapour of smoke in the air, or the new shoot of a tree fern. Of course, Maori knew this shape (the koru) very well, and when you look at Maori carving you realise they understood deeply the connectedness between curves and the way of the world.
And that is what Jencks has found, too. Only in his case he has come to it from the fields of biology, physics and mathematics. For instance, there’s the twisting of the double-helix in the DNA molecule, the structure of cells and the way they divide, and Fibonacci Numbers, the sequence beginning with 1 and 2, which are added, and then the sum added to the previous number.
It sounds like high-level mathematics. But it’s actually the basis behind all natural, curving shapes, from pine cones to the shell of a snail. And that, in fact, is what the largest mound in the garden is called – The Snail.
The garden also contains a series of amazing sculptures, including one that appears in many garden design books. It’s set in a grove of young birch trees, and is composed of a long length of twisting, spring-like stainless steel cut from a single sheet.
In addition to all the curves, there’s also an astonishing, very linear piece that runs right along a major railway line (the line where we turned around on our first foray down the farm road).
I don’t know whether Jencks paid to have the railway bridge painted or not, but the colour and the form look almost as if they’re part of the installation. It starts with a set of sleepers off to the side of the bridge, suspended over the water.
Standing right at the end you see that the side fences run away from you on an ever-increasing angle, until they reach a set of two small hills. Beyond that there are a series of steel sheets, about 15 feet apart, with the names and dates of famous Scots, and quotations cut into the steel, so that the words show through to the sky behind.
They depict the movement of knowledge through time, and in my mind, at least, carry on from a small plaque at the bottom of the birch grove that gives the following, sombre (but truthful) message – Thought Steps Forward/Death by Death.
My favourite of the rail group, especially since we were in the misty and history-laden Scottish countryside, was this from Robbie Burns. It seemed almost to be speaking directly to us, given the wonderful gift we had just been handed:
Give Me Ae Spark O’ Nature’s Fire, That’s A’ The Learning I Desire
We departed reluctantly, since there were still things we hadn’t seen, including one of the most remarkable modern takes on the parterre (or formal garden) found anywhere in the world. It sits behind a high fence, and was being worked on by the head gardener (the father of the man who had let us in). As we approached we could hear that he was having a very deep conversation with one of the apprentices.
We just couldn’t bring ourselves to break in on the moment, and so we walked back to the entrance, staring at each other, and laughing through our smiles. We couldn’t believe we had actually seen and experienced the garden that had captivated us in pictures for so many years.
And as if to reinforce just how special a time it was, as we got into our van the thickest of fogs descended into the valley and it began to pour with rain.
~originally composed in June, 2011~