Chapter 7: How Living Process Generates The Character Of Gardens

Claims (25)

• A garden with real life comes from thinking in living terms about every plant, every path, every bush, the fertilizer, the water, every little wall.
  Prescription for mindful, granular attention in gardening.
• Always, you are trying to make positive space.
  Guiding principle for arranging structures in a garden.
• Centers govern life.
  Terse, fundamental assertion about the causal priority of centers.
• Color will probably play an important role in gardens, in flowers and flowering bushes and trees of different seasons — even if it is based only on the huge variety of greens.
  Prediction about the aesthetic features of gardens shaped by living process.
• If the fundamental process is working, a garden becomes a trace of the history of the land.
  Key causal claim: unfolding process produces a legible history in the garden's form.
• If this 20% is robbed from the budget, the thing will die.
  Stark warning that failing to fund outdoor structures kills the life of the project.
• It is my belief that a garden is a structure — not very different from a building.
  Foundational claim that gardens are built artifacts, not merely natural growth.
• It is the geometry of these built structures, which, like the shell of a mollusc, makes the growing of the garden, and its resulting richness, possible.
  Analogy emphasizing that geometry enables organic richness.
• Living process in a garden depends on people following their own hearts, allowing the call of their own hearts, dreams, feeling, to become actual in this place.
  The necessity of authentic personal investment for living process to succeed.
• Positive space in gardens must be created by placing buildings to form positive outdoor spaces, then differentiating them with structures, then allowing natural life to animate further centers.
  Operational sequence for creating positive garden space.
• Seats, fences, and other centers, placed in the landscape to connect the garden with the buildings, will form a continuity of structure between inside and outside.
  The function of garden structures as connectors that erase the boundary.
• That is the essence of all gardens, and all agriculture: that built materials, human-made structures create a setting in which people, animals and plants can thrive.
  Definitional claim about gardens as a symbiosis of built structure and living nature.
• The beat of informality against the discipline of geometric order, can lead to the most splendid qualities.
  The aesthetic outcome of the interplay between wildness and formality.
• The exterior structure is as vital a part of the structure of the whole, as the building.
  The equal importance of outdoor built elements to the building itself.
• The form of the garden, and its living structure, come from progressive unfolding the position of one plant continuing and unfolding from the earlier growth of another.
  Definition of garden form as a sequential, emergent process.
• The loveliest gardens come from allowing nature to take its course very strongly, helping it to be more like nature.
  A prescription for gardening based on non-interference.
• The newly created centers work best, if they are based on something, some trace, that is there already.
  The principle of preserving and intensifying existing centers, key to the fundamental process.
• The quality of exterior space which comes from living process has a particular and definable morphology.
  Opening claim that establishes the chapter's thesis.
• The school staff put the ducks on the pond because the lake made them feel something; their feeling fills the place, they are not just 'ducks.'
  Interpretation of the duck story as evidence that real feeling gets embodied in the garden.
• The unassuming, ordinary, touching quality can only be created by a living process, by unfolding.
  Strong exclusivity claim: only unfolding produces genuine ordinariness that touches people.
• The wildness of an unfolded garden does not become most natural without support; it becomes most vivid when supported by a delicate system of small walls, edges, terraces, trellised structure.
  Paradox that wildness requires formal built support to reach its highest expression.
• This living structure in a garden is very different from the kind of structure typically created by 20th-century landscape design or landscape architecture.
  Contrastive claim distinguishing the result of living process from conventional practice.
• To treat the gardens as positive — more positive, even, than the buildings themselves — that is the first step.
  The inversion of typical priority: garden space should be shaped as strongly as (or stronger than) buildings.
• Walls, catching the sun, are likely to play a special role for climbing trees, fruit, apricots, roses and trellises.
  Specific prediction about sun-warmed walls as key centers in gardens.
• When we follow the fundamental process, we try to make, at each step, a real living center.
  Operational description of the fundamental process's intent.