Author Archives: DCLA

As a member of the Royal Parks Guild and the landscape architect responsible for overseeing the HLF funded works in 2004, I was invited to a brief overview of the HLF works and what was achieved.

£3.4 million across c.200 acres, including three new park building, (cafes and a boat store). The aim was to make sure the park received best possible value and that it was brought into a state fit for 21^st Century users.

About fifty members enjoyed a guided walk followed by lunch.

The Landscape Institute are now part of the Open House Weekend initiative and asked for volunteers to lead walks around recently completed projects or around favourite places.

Sat.21 September – Kings Cross Walk

I chose this area as I live locally and have seen the place change dramatically in the last twenty years. It is a brilliant example of sensitive and robust conservation combined with bold contemporary insertion of new infrastructure. We saw the new spaces between Kings Cross and St Pancras; Kings Cross Square; The Regents Quarter; Kings Place; Granary Square; the canal; and St Pancras Old Church.

Open House Kings Cross – Kings Place

Open House Kings Cross – Regents Canal

Open House Kings Cross – St Pancras Old Church & John Soanes Tomb

Sun.22 September – Fulham Palace

This is the core part of the country seat for the Bishops of London from the Tudor period until the late 20^th Century. The garden saw new plants introduced to England from the Americas from the Seventeenth Century onwards.

Before the embankment was built, the gardens ran down to the river. DCLA have drawn up a Long Term Vision for presentation of the gardens for Fulham Palace Trust.

Open House Fulham Palace

Open House Fulham Palace

Gardener of Eden, By Jez Abbott

Geoffrey Jellicoe was an enormous influence on Dominic Cole, so it is appropriate that he is to give this year’s Jellicoe Lecture.

When Dominic Cole gives the Jellicoe lecture on 8 November it will be in the most appropriate place possible — the Eden Project where he was the principal designer. He will offer a tantalising glimpse into the creative process behind this most unusual landform.

That creation is now 12 years old and maturing well, both inside and outside the biomes that gave world-famous definition to the former china clay pit. As masterplanner Cole transformed steep, filthy industrial land into a verdant yet lunar-like landscape, and he feels it is fitting to return to St Austell, Cornwall, for this particular lecture.

Cole, chairman of the Garden History Society and of the National Trust parks and gardens advisory panel, admires the legacy of Geoffrey Jellicoe, who died in 1996. This was five years before Eden, but his influence is not lost on Cole who insists the old master’s blend of modernity grounded in context makes Jellicoe ‘polymathic’ — a person of great and varied learning.

As a child in Tring, Hertfordshire, Cole romped around the Water Gardens in Hemel Hempstead, one of Jellicoe’s favourite designs. As a student at Leeds Poly, he met Jellicoe, and right now Cole is working to restore the playground of his youth. This is badly neglected but traces of the original form and structure are still visible beneath the dereliction and undergrowth.

Yet it is still the clay pit that captures the limelight. Tim Smit’s wily charm helped mastermind Eden; Cole’s intellectual rigour made it happen. Both had worked on the Lost Gardens of Heligan, also in Cornwall, and as a principal of Land Use Consultants (LUC) Cole’s team did the lot at Eden; not just the greenery, but science, zones Of visual influence, photomontage and analyses.

`I was there last summer,’ Cole says. The structural landscape — the stuff I was responsible for, the naming and placing of big plants — was starting to mature. It feels like it should feel, and that’s exciting. I felt there were maybe too many interpretation notices for plots and plants that could self-tell their story, but I still feel extremely proud of the project.

`The message and the point of Eden still have potency. Would I do anything differently? No, I’m assuming this will be the biggest project I ever do, and we had to make it what it was; nobody told us what to do. This took three years and endless rounds of talks, many of them after hours with a glass of wine, or two.

`The frustrating thing was how to set parameters on what stories we were going to tell and how we were going to tell them,’ he recalls, praising botany tutor and founding Eden director Peter Thoday. ‘I just had a sense of what I wanted and needed to do.

I have never been so sure of myself with a design. The ideas came out of my head and straight on to the paper.’ Cole’s rigour extends beyond the computer and — his preferred tool — the drawing board, into the drier realm of management and governance. As chairman of the Garden History Society for several years, he has ruffled institutional feathers but helped transform an “imploding” group into a well-oiled outfit with hundreds of thousands of pounds in the bank.

He is also a trustee of plant-health charity Living Medicine and has been working on an ‘edible motorway service station’ project called the Gloucester Gateway, on a housing scheme in Oxford with dedicated food-growing spaces, and on the Southbank Queen Elizabeth Hall roof garden which incorporates allotments. These are just the type of interests that would have hit home with left-field entrepreneur Tim Smit.

Cole also had plenty of experience with which to win over Smit. He joined LUC in 1982 and has worked at impressive historic properties, including Trentham Gardens, Lowther Castle, Stowe, Wrest Park, Audley End and at Alnwick Castle for the racy Duchess of Northumberland, who announced plans a couple of years ago to host cage-fighting in the very historic grounds tended by Cole.

At Trentham near Stoke on Trent in 2004, Cole worked with Tom Stuart-Smith and Dutchman Piet Oudolf on a flower garden, pleasure garden and parterre in the garden , originally laid out by Capability Brown. You could hardly find a starker contrast than that between the geometry of this garden and the organic maelstrom of curves at the Eden Project.

This shift in emphasis from the historic to the contemporary cutting edge is made easy by the fluid nature of landscape architecture, which constantly ‘reinvents’ itself, Cole says. New entrants to the profession today are, he believes, entering a different workplace with different skills from those of his generation. The debate on style has become stale and too rigid for this evolving art.

`I get bored with the modern-versus-historic debate and don’t see myself specialising in any area,’ Cole said. ‘As a profession we are crap at explaining what we do. There’s rarely reference to the intellectual content and depth of understanding we bring to a space. It’s a fascinating but difficult conundrum; how do we explain what we do?

This strikes a raw nerve with Cole, who looks back to the golden age of Jellicoe and reckons that today’s professionals are partly to blame: ‘Landscape architects forget to celebrate what they do,’ he says. ‘There were fewer than ten when the institute was being formed after the war and they were rebuilding Britain on a megascale; power stations, housing estates, new towns.

`It was the go-to profession if you wanted to do masterplanning, and over the years we have lost that bigger picture. We have become an unseen profession and whinge about not being noticed. That’s partly because we have compartmentalised ourselves. I constantly hear expressions like green infrastructure and urban design as if they are new and separate skills.

`So tendering has become hopelessly complex involving endless services — landscape, ecology, archaeology etc. We seem to have lost the confidence to tackle a job outright under the heading of landscape architect. I see landscape architecture as an umbrella with services underneath not outside.’

Cole constantly refers to pride and passion, not just in his work but in respect of the wider profession. He is ‘passionate’ about mending schisms between designers and contractors and gardeners, and ‘proud’ that landscape architecture is not only helping to shape the modern world, but is also ensuring ‘cities, at any scale, can be liveable and sustainable’.

Article from the Landscape Institute Journal, Autumn 2013

At the coalface: garden history heritage conservation and interpretation

The Garden History Society, established in Britain in 1966, is currently consolidating fruitful links with kindred organisations, providing a useful model for co-operative partnerships.

From where I sit, as Chairman of the Garden History Society and a long-time enthusiast for the conservation of gardens and landscapes, I feel that our shared interests are on the cusp of change. But firstly, as GHS Chairman, I am the lucky one who gets to see our complementary copy of Australian Garden History and the Australian Garden History Society should be congratulated for its journal, which I really look forward to reading, even though I have not visited Australia and most of the place names are alien to me. (My two favourite editions—for their covers alone—are the ones showing the rotating clothes driers and the tyre swan. The latter is in the queue for framing and if anyone would like to send me the real thing I would be a happy recipient.)

Before musing on the state of garden history I should explain that I am not a historian but am very passionate about historic gardens and fascinated by the mechanics of a small voluntary organisation such as the GHS—and by extension, sister organisations such as the AGHS—and how we can harness the energies, enthusiasms, and knowledge of our members to make sure that historic gardens get the best possible deal. I believe that it is a huge waste of energy for small organisations to be political internally and hope that the GHS concentrates on the issues at hand rather than individual egos. Now that there is so much information available on the internet it seems less relevant to be over-protective of individual academic study and I am proud that our internationally recognised journal Garden History is now available in digital format on JSTOR after two years from publication.

This is not to deny that there continue to be revelatory and beautiful publications on garden history. I have to cite, in particular The Garden of Ideas (2010), which is meticulously researched, but accessible and one of the most spectacularly illustrated books on garden history I have seen. If I had to pick my favourite illustration it would be Adelaide’s Prospect House in the late 1840s (pp.96-97), for opening my eyes to the absurdity of creating a picky British Regency pattern of beds in the middle of a desert! My former student Caroline Grant also sent a copy of Cape Arid (2012) illustrated by Phillipa and Alex Nikulinsky; what a stunning work—much greater than Marianne North and making me want to give up trying to draw anything!

But what of the state of garden history in the United Kingdom? Because of the political separation of Wales and Northern Ireland, active involvement of the GHS in conservation concentrates on England and Scotland. The national body, English Heritage, makes grant aid available to the GHS and several other ‘amenity societies’ to deal with responses to planning casework—applications for development and change that may affect historic parks and gardens. English Heritage does not have the resources in house to make such responses and is following a central government agenda to work ‘locally’, with local people and, especially, volunteers.

The GHS works with fellow umbrella body, the Association of Gardens Trusts (that represents some 35 county groups throughout England) to encourage and provide training for the local groups. The grant aid does not cover the full cost of employing qualified professionals to respond to planning casework—the remainder of the funds are found through membership subscriptions and activities—and with a dropping membership due largely to austerity and ageing the GHS has to be ever more careful with the housekeeping. Our public face needs to respond to new ways of communicating so that we appeal to a younger audience.

Aside from the role of the GHS to keep an eye out for the protection and conservation gardens it is encouraging to consider the huge input of funding for parks and gardens that has been generated by the National Lottery (via the Heritage Lottery Fund). Local authorities and charitable organisations may apply for funds to plan conservation and refurbishment, usually requiring professional input. Tens of millions of pounds has been spent on parks and gardens since the Lottery started. The programme is intended to increase involvement by local people and has seen the evolution of friends groups, community hubs, and a generally raised awareness that there is such a thing as a historic park.

The National Trust talks about conservation as ‘managing the process of change’ (such as decay, new car parks, wear and tear) and that it needs to happen in a way that is sensitive to the property. As a volunteer on its Parks and Gardens Advisory Panel it is surprising how often we need to gently point out the extraordinary qualities of the gardens which Trust staff manage. There is always a push, especially among younger staff, to imprint their own ideas and to break out in to new ground, usually meaning less time to garden the garden that is significant! Overall though the National Trust has ‘modernised’ dramatically and continues to seek ways of appealing to a wider and more diverse membership. The organisation is currently trialing partnerships working in the inner city parts of London and Manchester—being acutely aware of its lack of visibility within towns and cities—and is looking for opportunities to engage with partnering local groups, regeneration teams, and the like.

English Heritage has, if anything, dumbed down its offer. What was once the bastion of serious academic understanding and conservation has turned into a commercial organisation desperate to be an attraction—re-enacting battles, creating `Olde English Fayres’, and this year at Bolsover showing Lipizzaner horses riding in the indoor riding school. The organisation still provides excellent guidance and support, and maintains rigour in responding to the planning process, but its public face tends not to shout about these activities.

The Garden History Society has also seen some success in campaign work—following a study day at a modernist water garden (Geoffrey Jellicoe designed gardens in the centre of post-war New Town, Hemel Hempstead), we managed to get front pages on several local newspapers describing the sadly neglected state of this exquisite site followed by two pages in The Times. The result is that the local authority has received funding to prepare a conservation management plan.

How do we know what we want to save? I think the statutory English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens—now identifying over 1600 places— is an amazing resource and one that continues to serve us well. There is comprehensive coverage of the country, additions continue to be made, the process of adding a site is rigorous and ‘peer tested’ (and I don’t mean by the House of Lords), and the gradings of significance and extent of designation are usually remarkably fair and accurate. A very helpful companion to the Register is Ray Desmond’s Bibliography of British and Irish Gardens (1984). Although in need of updating it is still a brilliant treasure trove. The website of Parks & Gardens UK extends the coverage of sites using research done in individual counties by volunteers in the County Gardens Trusts this is a work in progress and is increasingly useful as it is more and more populated. And there is also The Historic Gardens of England series by Tim Mowl (and his colleagues). I would say the series might be compared to Pevsner’s celebrated Buildings of England—a single point of view that is fresh, lively, and good to use alongside the strictly factual, but perhaps more dry sources. The fact that Tim makes sure he walks the sites and weaves in stories of contemporary influences (including the economy, politics, and people) is part of its charm.

Thinking of this creative interpretation, the Garden Museum has been transformed by the energetic and knowledgeable director Christopher Woodward— turning the institution around and putting on a programme of activities, lectures, and exhibitions that regularly get into the national press as ‘things to do’ in London. He oversaw the physical conversion from decaying, deconsecrated church to a light, modem, buzzing hub of the garden history world. The next stage of transformation will see new spaces built and the possibility of a new home for the Garden History Society.

But despite these gains, the view from my armchair is not universally brilliant. There are still plenty of threats to parks and gardens, but the overall state of awareness and of individuals and organisations willing to stand up for this fantastic resource is different from twenty years ago. There are, I believe, now far more people across the country who understand that garden history is an area of interest and that it is important and even entertaining to understand these places so they do not disappear. Unfortunately the people who ‘get it’ are generally amateur enthusiasts and there is still a dismal lack of understanding of garden history and conservation within local authorities and among professionals such as landscape architects, architects, and planners. Garden history to them is still seen as ‘fuddy duddy’ and for ladies of a certain age. We need to turn this perception around.

www.gardenhistorysociety.org

www.english-heritage.org.uk

www.parksandgardens.org

www.gardenmuseum.org.uk

Landscape architect Dominic Cole worked with Land Use Consultants for almost three decades until 2012 when he established his own practice. With one short interregnum, he has been Chairman of the Garden History Society since 2001 and also chairs the National Trust’s Parks and Gardens Advisory Panel. His projects include interpretation work with Tim Smit at Heligan and master planning for the Eden Project. www.dominiccole.net

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD WATER GARDENS

Personal statement from Dominic Cole Landscape Architect, Chairman of the Garden History Society, Chairman of The National Trust Gardens & Parks Advisory Panel.
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I studied Landscape Architecture at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) 1975-1979.  In my final year we organised a student conference for landscape students, but open to all.  It was one of the largest & best organised of such events I have ever experienced.  Geoffrey Jellicoe was the key speaker & I was invited to have dinner with him the evening before he spoke.

The main project he presented was The Water Gardens & I can recall his enthusiasm & the pride for the scheme that had been completed some eight years before.  He was proud of it & considered it one of his most successful projects.

The talk was not recorded but I do remember some key points:

1. Jellicoe was the Masterplanner for the New Town of Hemel Hempstead – not just the Water Gardens, so is important to consider the context & the green spaces along the River Gade, both to the north & to the south.

2. Planning the Water Gardens was complex because the site is long and narrow – to create the illusion of space Jellicoe employed a number of design devices, including:

a) Creating the illusion that the water was more extensive by using different channel widths, vanishing points, levels & sound.
b) Sinking the car parks behind a raised planted bank so the cars were invisible & the space apparently flowed to the west
c)The formal garden was raised at the west end to hide the main road & create the illusion that the space contrived out & across the fields to the west. As a result the sloping gardens were more visible from Bank Court.
d) The ‘Lovers Walk’ (north/south) was created as a meandering path to deliberately slow people up so they would enjoy the garden.

3. The weirs were designed to make different sounds.  Jellicoe & His designer wife Susan had researched & written an important book on water in the landscape:

“WATER: The Use of Water in Landscape Architecture” by Susan & Geoffrey Jellicoe 1971. A&C Black Ltd
He knew the powerful psychological effects that the sound of moving water could have.  Each of the weirs in the water garden is ‘tuned’ to make a different noise & he experimented with various forms of weir (with the contractor) before finalising the designs.

4. The architectural elements, in particular the bridges & viewing platforms, needed to appear to float over the water.  The bridges are designed with a deep central spine with much shallower wings either side to give their profile a delicate appearance.  The viewing platforms are cantilevered & have a memory of the decks of an ocean liner.

5. The budget for the works was tight & Jellicoe made ingenious use of space & inexpensive materials to achieve a complete scheme that transcends the value of the individual elements.  And if any of those elements were not there the scheme would be the lesser for it.

6. There was an important design contrast designed in to the scheme.  The west side was to be soft & meandering, relating to garden & rural sentiments.  The east side along Waterhouse Street was formal and linear, relating to the town.  The series of bridges are the link & transition between the two sides.  The overall idea was that busy shoppers or residents moving from their car to The Marlowes and, more importantly, returning from shopping would be passing through a relaxing space where they would be encouraged to slow down (the bridges are arched to encourage you to pause & look at the water) and, even, to stop & sit on one of the viewing platforms or in the formal gardens to enjoy a moments peace.

7. Susan Jellicoe’s planting design for the formal garden included colourful and scented plants to further stimulate the senses – adding to the gentle water noises created at the weirs. In the canon of Jellicoe’s work and comparing to his design for The Morton Biscuit Factory on the Wirral, Central Plymouth & the Roof Garden at Harvey’s in Guilford, Hemel Hempstead is the most successful design for an urban setting of its period & contains a diverse range of hard and soft design features that are ‘of – a – piece’.  Although there have been encroachments, most notably the decked car park, the overall design survives remarkably in tact.

Dominic Cole will be taking 2 landscape tours at this year’s Open House London (21-22 September). The first will be on Saturday.. a tour of the King’s Cross area meeting at 11.30am outside King’s Cross Station entrance facing St Pancras way – and the second will be on Sunday.. a tour of Bishop’s Park / Fulham Palace Gardens at 2.30pm. For further info, please get in touch!

See the Open House website for more information..

Alexandra Palace has been awarded a Green Flag 2013-2014. See more information on the Green Flag Website

The Landscape Institute is delighted to announce that Dominic Cole will give this year’s Jellicoe lecture at the Eden Project, for which he was the landscape architect.

Cole will deliver the lecture on the evening of Friday 8 November. This will be an exciting opportunity for anybody who has not visited the project, or who wants to see it again, to listen to its designer speaking in situ.

Cole masterplanned Eden with project founder Tim Smit after previously working with him at the Lost Gardens of Heligan. At the time he worked for Land Use Consultants, where he spent 29 years, until setting up on his own in January 2012.

Dominic Cole studied landscape architecture at Leeds Polytechnic and has always appreciated the practical training , particularly time spent in studio and on site with fellow students . He then spent short spells with the department of Environment , Tarsem Flora and Gernot Jung  before joining LUC.

His particular interest in historic landscapes and how they are understood and presented has led to him becoming chairman of the Garden History Society and chairman of the National Trust Parks & Gardens advisory panel. He is also is a trustee of the charity Living Medicine which promotes plants for good health – both medicinally and by enjoying eating them.

The Jellicoe lecture will follow the Landscape Institute AGM. It will be an opportunity for Landscape Institute members to spend a weekend in Cornwall. The LI hopes to offer special tours of the project on Saturday 9 November.

£2.3m Lottery boost helps restore park to the people

GARDENS that were first opened to the public more than a century ago by Victorian tea trader and collector Frederick Horniman will reopen next week after a £13 million redevelopment. The 16-acre park surrounding the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill has been landscaped and refurbished so that attractions such as the sunken garden, musical instrument sculptures and animal walk with alpacas, ferrets and rabbits relate directly to its natural history, botanical and musical collections.

The revamp also includes the bandstand which has a new weather vane. Screens at the rear of the bandstand have been removed to restore impressive views of the London skyline. Finbarr Whooley, the museum’s deputy director, said their aim was to return to the original ideas of their founder. “Horniman definitely had a clear integrated vision that the gardens and the museum were linked to each other.” He gave the museum to London County Council in 1901 for use by the people of the capital.

A fifth of its annual 600.000 visitors are under five and 71 per cent are family groups so the height of the sculptures and facilities such as a new gardens pavilion have been tailored by landscape architect Dominic Cole to suit.

The Horniman is one of four London parks and gardens opening next week after refurbishment under the Parks for People initiative run by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Big Lottery Fund, The others are Barking Park, Bracknell Park, and Bishops Park within the Fulham Palace grounds. They received a total of £11 million. A revamped Victoria Park reopened in the East End this month.

Wesley Kerr, chairman of the heritage lottery fund in London, said the programme was the biggest investment in the city’s open spaces since Victorian times. The work means that locals can enjoy them to the full once again.

“Before the Lottery came into being over 17 years ago many of London’s parks and gardens were in a sorry state, under-used by their communities and in some cases avoided altogether. Now the capitals’ parks are once again becoming destination green spaces that people can be proud of,” he said.

Read the article on the Evening Standard Website.

Solo landscaper

Dominic Cole, principal, Dominic Cole Landscape Architects

A well-known figure in landscape architecture and historic landscapes, Dominic Cole has recently set up on his own after three decades at Land Use Consultants, having worked on landmark schemes such as the Lost Gardens of Heligan, the Eden Project, Trentham Gardens and Lowther Castle as well as with the National Trust, the Garden History Society and many other bodies.

Q Why have you decided to set up on your own?

A After 29 years at Land Use  Consultants (LUC), I felt I had certain ways of working and certain types of job but I was still keen to pursue quite small jobs and not what LUC could do. Last year, the practice was looking at rationalising resources and I started to discuss taking off and working on my own. The result was that I took voluntary redundancy and started as Dominic Cole Landscape Architects in February.

Q What was the rationale behind 4LUC rationalising?

A The difficulty with bigger companies is they are still having to pull in the big jobs but there are fewer such jobs and more people going for them. It’s simple economics. I’ve spoken to a few single operators and being small at this time is not too bad. I can charge less than I would have done at LUC and it also means that I can do more of the tasks I enjoy —talking to designers and being on site. I was moving plants on an herbaceous border yesterday and I couldn’t have done that at LUC because I was too expensive. It’s quite a positive move.

Q The Eden Project is making some redundancies. What’s happening there?

A I’ve not been for three or four years but it’s the same answer as before. If they’re not getting as many visitors as before they won’t be able to employ as many people.

Q Are big projects such as Eden not happening anymore?

A I don’t think so. You could have asked that in the run-up to Eden, although that was different because it got Millennium Commission money. I worked on the plans for Trentham after St Modwen spent £100m on it out of the blue. So, never say never.

Q What are you working on at the moment?

A I have residual jobs from LUC including the entrance to the Geffrye Museum in London. I’m working on a couple of projects with Malcolm Reading Consultants — feasibility studies for historic landscapes that have gone into receivership or reached a stage where the previous developers or owners are looking at what to do with the site. I’m working on an historic landscape survey with Patrick James’s Landscape Agency at Stanford Hall near Loughborough and at Belford Hall in Northumberland. There’s ongoing work at Hampstead Heath and a number of enquiries I can’t talk about yet.

Q What are you working on at the Garden History Society?

A We’ve been talking to the Association of Garden Trusts, the Garden Museum and the Parks & Gardens Database looking at ways for more collaboration, and that’s starting to take off. We’ve lost members in these economic times but combined we have 20,000 members, which starts to get people’s attention when you run a campaign.

Q What sort of campaign are you thinking about?

A The society is a statutory consultee so any planning inquiry for a historic landscape is referred to us. We get 1,500-1,700 a year and the conservation team has found it difficult to do substantial responses to all of them. We’re continuing to respond to major inquiries but in the future we will consider lobbying local authorities — for instance, at Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens we raised awareness of the landscape being in poor nick. One opportunity I felt that we lost out on was being a more effective voice for Greenwich Park in the run-up to the Olympics, although that was a lost cause because the Olympic committee had made its decision. There will be other situations where by placing articles in the press rather than just responding to local authorities we might be more effective. I’m trying to spend less time with the society. It is important for the charity run by volunteers that they are given tasks to take on. I just want the “working together project” to bed in before I say: “Right, I’m off.”

Q What are you doing with the National Trust parks and garden panels at the moment?

A It’s really rewarding. I make eight or nine visits a year to properties when they are planning new car parks and visitor strategies. At Fell Foot in the Lake District, we suggested that a plan for a substantial area of car parking was a big distraction and pointed out that by concentrating on the site they would be offering a really good visitor attraction in line with National Trust aims and objectives of getting people out and understanding properties. I’ve also been to Cotehele in Cornwall. We develop a plan and then the property managers think about it.

Matthew Appleby

CV

1983-2012 Landscape designer, latterly principal, Land Use Consultants.

2001-07 and 2009 to date Chairman, Garden History Society

2004 to date National Trust parks and gardens panel (chair from 2006)

2012 to date Principal, Dominic Cole Landscape Architects

No.13 – Dominic Cole

Not a household name among gardeners, Dominic Cole is more of a behind-the-scenes operator, quietly exerting influence during the past decade as chair or both the National Trust’s gardens advisory panel and of the Garden History Society (GHS). Cole is credited as the saviour of the GHS after it got into financial difficulties and has campaigned for higher pay for garden staff with the National Trust. Formidably well connected, Cole’s “day job” is as one of the most experienced historic gardens consultants in Britain.

Read the full article on the Telegraph website

Why memories matter

Remembrance Sunday focuses our attention on those service personnel who have lost their lives in combat. But, asks Dominic Cole, is the concept of a memorial garden still relevant in 21st century Britain? Photography by Neil Hepworth

REMEMBERING PEOPLE OR EVENTS through the designation of outside space is a long-held tradition. Whether it is squashing your first dead hamster into a cardboard box, burying it in the garden and planting a few limp wild flowers on top; or designing a living, publicly-accessible memorial in the middle of a city, both should be considered special sites.Yet, are such traditions still relevant to our society, and how can memorial gardens respond to an increasingly diverse multicultural Britain?

I live on the slopes above the River Fleet in North London, the river long-since confined to a pipe. But, for me, it is some comfort to know that the Fleet and its one-time tributaries were littered with shrines to all manner of gods. These ‘holy wells’ are remembered in place names such as Sadlers Wells, Clerkenwell and Brides Well, and were supposed to have healing qualities. The shrines, in their day, were probably also celebrated by gifts of wild flowers. Knowing that these one-time shrines abound under my feet makes me feel connected to the location and reminds me of its history.

Flowers and plants connect us strongly with places and events: not just the big events such as marriages or birthdays, but also the library of memories evoked by the scents of particular flowers or leaves. Summer-flowering jasmine takes me to Crete; Rosa ‘Lady Penzance’ (in light summer rain) to the space between the wood pile and the front door of my parent’s house; and Primula florindae to the pool that my father and I made together. Scent, the sense most closely associated with memory, plays its part in linking plants to place, and as a result, people to places.

Making a connection?

Of course, we all experience such personal memories, but it is perhaps the civic sharing of such spaces that is most powerful. The significance of flowers is recognised in the 708ha (1,750 acres) gardened by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, since 1918. The commission’s original intent was to use plants native to the casualties’ home, thereby heightening the clear connection between plants and place. This connection and recognition of native landscape is why Cannock Chase was chosen as the site for the German Military Cemetery, Staffordshire —with its heather, pine and birch, it looked like the northern European landscapes of Germany and Austria.

Landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s design for the John F. Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede, Berkshire, is simple and reflective — less horticulture, more atmosphere. He referenced the classics in telling the design story but created a place that feels personal — perhaps our empathetic relationship to the assassinated president? The 50 steps in the scheme represent one year of his life; the granite setts can be thought of as individuals — each one is hand cut and has a different ‘personality’. No one step is even or equal — the struggle to negotiate the pathway reflects the challenge of life that we cope with.

An alternative model for remembering was set up by the Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton in 1946. He set aside £50 million to establishThe land Fund that would be used to buy land, develop National Parks and give access to the countryside. He was suggesting the broadest and most inclusive way of remembering that would include all cultures and communities. His amazing vision was soon squashed by a subsequent government who preferred to buy art treasures instead, and prop up a desperate economy. Even though the fund was revived in 1980 as the National Heritage Memorial Fund, it has a different, broader focus.

But what of current times? If a memorial garden is to be created, it should be a real, tangible place — not a ‘virtual’, self-indulgent page on a social networking site. It must have personality and a clear link to the people it remembers. A real garden however means that it must not be a bleak space based on the premise of low-maintenance — a concept that insults those being remembered. As Britain continues to become an increasingly multicultural society, Dalton’s desire to create inclusive, diverse ways in remembering people rings increasingly true.

We must think hard though, to understand if a memorial garden is actually what the dead would have wanted. As Dalton said when establishing The Land Fund: ‘…that we should make, through this fund….a memorial which…is better than any work of art in stone or bronze’, remains a powerful concept.