Outside Context

When Cesca first showed me the draw­ing plans for the UCS garden at RHS Mal­vern, I knew that it was going to be spe­cial. But noth­ing could pre­pare me for the final res­ult. More a large scale high-art install­a­tion than a garden; it is play­ful, fun and def­in­itely send­ing a mes­sage that we can all understand.

I have been read­ing a book recently, called “The World Without Us ‚” in it the author, Alan Weis­man, writes of how nature – that per­vas­ive force – would take over after we are gone. Con­crete would fall down, build­ings would crumble under vines and the remains of human­ity would dis­ap­pear; and quicker than you would ima­gine. Of course, for us Daoists we don’t see the human and so called “nat­ural” worlds as dif­fer­ent at all. They are all parts of the same thing; and it is only human arrog­ance that dis­tin­guishes us and our achieve­ments. When we see meta,l and we think that it is not a “nat­ural” sub­stance, we for­get that we stand upon a 50 tril­lion ton ball of the same stuff. Given the size of the Uni­verse, our small scratches on that metal ball amount to a glint of light in a mil­lion years of sun­shine, but we don’t see it that way. We still think we are in con­trol. As Weis­man shows in his book – that is the ulti­mate illusion.

And so it is with the UCS garden, los­ing con­trol leads to organic growth and non-human cycles of birth and decay tak­ing back the ground. Return­ing to the rhythm all of its own. It wont be rushed, it is like the blow­ing play­ful wind, and as garden­ers we might con­duct this orches­tra briefly, but we hardly could claim con­trol of it.

We work with it.

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