In the end, the service station did not make the cut, but in his exploration Don questions what a garden can be, highlighting several projects that hover at the boundaries of art – such as the Crawick Multiverse in Dumfries and Galloway, created across 55 acres of a former open-cast coal mining site. In 2015 it was reimagined after the Duke of Buccleuch commissioned the landscape architect Charles Jencks to reinvigorate the site with a monumental scheme of landforms, voids, walks, and monolithic stones arranged in a cosmic design.
Another example is Plaz Metaxu in Devon – a series of enclosed spaces, clipped forms, reflective bodies of water, and inscribed standing stones created over decades by Alasdair Forbes in what was once a collection of fields. “It’s entirely metaphorical and symbolic,” he explains. “If you don’t get the references, if you’re not really informed about classical mythology, that’s another level of challenge, but it was completely fascinating.”
For Don, who was making British Gardens concurrently with a series on Spanish gardens, our climate is a gift. Gardening in Britain, he says, is relatively easy compared to almost anywhere else in the world. “You go to central Spain, where in winter it’s –15C for five weeks, and in summer it’s 50C-plus for five weeks. How anything grows is a miracle. The worst we get is too much rain, or a little bit too much heat or a little bit too much cold. We’re not serious people when it comes to weather – almost everything will grow.”
In his introduction, Don sets out how we became a nation of gardeners, rooted in the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution led to rapid urbanisation. “A wider range of society was able to garden for pleasure rather than for need, and this idea that the garden is an escape, a sanctuary, a haven developed,” he says. Gardening is, he believes, one of the very few things that cuts across class. “It’s a lingua franca – you really, genuinely, can talk about gardening to anybody from any background and you’re speaking the same language.”
