a Scottish Garden I would really like to see - not what you'd expect

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http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/web/News/ReportsandPublications/ScienceAndPublicAffairs/SPAArchive/SPADec08/_JencksSPADec08.htm


The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Over several years I have worked on a Scottish landscape called, immodestly, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, speculating with scientists and others on the fundamental laws and forces behind nature and what they might mean to us. Using growing nature to conjecture on what is basic to the Universe is an old practice common to gardeners, but it raises some unlikely questions.

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My late wife Maggie and I started work on this garden around her family home in 1988 and slowly, area by area, it has grown into a landscape with about twenty areas dedicated to the fundamental units of the Universe: a Black Hole Terrace for dining on in the summer months; a DNA Garden of the Six Senses; the Quark Walk; the Universe Cascade and so on. Each insight into deep nature, many of which are recent, becomes translated into nature and sculpture.

Landform is my generic name for this genre that cuts across art, landscape, architecture and the customary categories, and there must be something like twenty-five of them throughout the garden. Some landforms refer to theories of folding and fractals, others (when they fail) to catastrophe theory. As every gardener knows, the dialogue with nature is always two-way, and it pays to exploit the unintended consequences of nature’s acts.

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The importance of names

So, in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation I try out questioning metaphors, and this means that all design is really double design: that is, solving formal and functional problems, and coming up with new, appropriate metaphors (both visual and verbal).

For instance, the Black Hole Terrace shows the space-time warps of super-gravity, the event horizons and rips in spacetime. But as design was progressing in 1995, and many were discovered and thought to lie at the centre of galaxies, the metaphor was changed to ‘Invisibilia,’ the female generator that helps hold much of the stars, planets and gas into their rotational shape. It is not just destructive, but a creative force.

When the Chinese asked me to design a rotating black hole for the Beijing Olympics, they accepted the design with delight but asked for a name change. We came up with several including Wu-Ji, and Wu-Chi, varying from ‘nameless chaos’ to the ‘mother of everything.’ They chose Wu-Chi, with its popular overtones and relationship to the word ‘energy’.
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there is a picture

[acmavm]

1. I want to see that Black Hole Terrace. From the only picture this article

has, I bet this place is something to see.

[ensho]

3. I tried to copy that pic and failed - you rule

nt

[acmavm]

4. That picture is amazing. Can you just imagine what the rest of the place

looks like?

Thanks for the article.

[FirstLight]

2. I actually sent this article to my gardening buddy!

I have a "blank slate" going on in my backyard, and these concepts are sweet...I may just decide to play with it!

:) thanks!

EDIT: I wish there were more pics, too! But I guess it is something for the imagination as well

[cliffordu]

5. Here's a copy of the book:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Wp61pwpYHHEC&dq=The+Garden+of+Cosmic+Speculation&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result

[ensho]

6. thank you - the iron work is fantastic on some of the pieces

LadyBird did her best to beautify us - may she be channeled, as they say.

[WePurrsevere]

7. Breathtaking... Thank you for sharing it.

I love the unusual. We have 7 acres here that I'd turn into artsy garden paths and rooms in a heartbeat if we had the funds.