Obsession – do all garden designers obsess, or is it just me?

 
We all have obsessions. I like to line up all the light switches – I hate to see just one off or on with a multi switch. And don’t get me started on breakfast.
I admit that I am also slightly obsessive when it comes to design, but then, aren’t all designers? Clients have their obsessions too though. I worked with a man once who absolutely insisted that no more than three materials should be seen ‘together’ at any time. Actually, this turned out to be rather an interesting obsession, and led to a very stripped back roof terrace using only timber, zinc and stone. Luckily, he did not include plants in the equation, although these were also very restrained – mostly just Buxus and Olives. The results were great.
Clients are often obsessed about particular colours – “NO ORANGE” (spoken in CAPITALS) – is a common stipulation. I have had people say to me before that they don’t like – say – yellow, only to say in the next breath that they love daffodils and isn’t the Laburnum walk at Bodnant just fantastic? Then there are those that are obsessive in different ways. Lawn obsessions are common amongst a particular type of client – often those who are also fond of serried topiary and hedges – a control fetish perhaps? These clients tend to feel really at home in gardens with almost no plants other than topiary, hedges and pleached trees. Nature beaten to submission.

 
So, back to my obsession? Geometry. I don’t mean the trigonometric kind (although I do secretly quite like that – don’t tell anyone). I am very particular about the ways planes and lines interact. For years I had very tightly controlled geometric schemes. Don’t get me wrong; this wasn’t always orthographic geometry – all right angles and straight lines. It wasquite predictable, but often (like the Pavilion apartments in St Johns Wood, 2001) used tight curves and arcs. Even though some of these were irregular arcs, I still couldn’t stop myself hanging the rest of the design around the radii that shot off from the arcs. This same interaction of arcs and radii cropped up again and again.

It wasn’t really until the slightly anarchic anti-geometry of the design for the Lancasters that I started to shake a bit looser. Here, low hedges rippled and swirled in a slightly out-of-control way down the length of the garden. Perhaps the final shake-loose was our project near the Rockies (see a post from October 2013 – ‘Northern Exposure’).

That garden appears to have almost no structure, although there is a framework of obtuse and seemingly unpredictable lines that holds it together. Even though that got quite a lot of it out of my system, I still can’t stop myself getting very hung up the way lines and planes come together. And if I am honest, I still line up the odd light switch. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing…