3 Thus the living aspect of gardens comes about, necessarily, as a result of unfolding in time
If the fundamental process is working, a garden becomes a trace of the history of the land. We try to erect structure. The structure comes from the land. Part of the story may then be forgotten. But the unfolding goes on. Another trace is made. It continues to unfold day by day and year by year.
The form of the garden, and its living structure, come from that progressive unfolding — the position of one plant continuing and unfolding from the earlier growth of another. This living structure in a garden is very different from the kind of structure typically created by 20th-century landscape design or landscape architecture. It is a kind of wildness which exists in a semi-cultivated form, backed by built material, helped by structures that entice natural life into existence. It is a state of the world in which what happens is always, and continually, in contact with what is.
The plums dropping from the trees onto the paving stones, the plums rotting, swept away by water or eaten by birds. The path, a pleasant place for people to wander, to think, arm in arm.
How different this is from the developer’s commercial “paradise”. The clean paving stones, the perfectly manicured place, which will keep people’s confidence up as they spend money; the place which never, ever, shows something out of place; the place which avoids ordinary things like plum trees because they have the nuisance of leaves and blossoms and plums dropping, and instead goes towards special high-tech plants chosen because they look natural yet need no maintenance, because they seem almost natural yet create no debris, need no birds to look after them, and give little sustenance to lovers strolling quietly arm in arm.
This unassuming, ordinary, touching quality can only be created by a living process, by unfolding. That means, by a process which allows plants, stones, water to exist, to occur, to develop and change in response to one another.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/7 The Character of Gardens#