Wallace Gardens: The Story of a Garden

IMAGINE

When beginning to create Wallace Gardens, no plan or size or expanse existed in my mind. Unfettered by experience, education or training in anything related to gardens or gardening, my imagination was free to roam. To run wild with mental images of gardens I never knew could exist.

A cornucopia of visions began to overflow from my mind. Too many to be confined to one idea or theme. Remembering Hidcote Garden and the Arts and Crafts style, a series of garden rooms, seemed an ideal way to bring many ideas to life as gardens with different styles, designs, moods, and feelings, each different yet related overall.

Beginning with an idea for only one garden, another idea came, then another and another. I thought of each garden room as a picture, unique and above all interesting. The freedom of imagining injected joy into the creative process.

For each garden room I strove for what was creative, what was interesting, what was unique, what was largely original-- certainly not my version of other gardens. One wants to be the needle in the haystack. Not the haystack.

At this point please understand that just as all music, regardless of style or performance, uses the same notes, chords, rhythms and dynamics, the germs of some ideas might have come from something I had seen or read. But other than the Monet Color Garden, nothing was consciously copied. Much was original with some elements possibly singular in the world.

Conventional wisdom holds that the left side of the brain tends toward quantitative, analytical, logical, and numerical concepts, while the right side tends toward the qualitative, intuitive, creative and artistic areas. This implies the interaction of both sides could create synergy, from a Greek word synergos or synergia, which means "working together."

Applying this theory to creating Wallace Gardens, the quantitative part of the brain created the geometric ground plan beginning with the central main axis, all cross axes at 90* angles, symmetry and a variety of geometric shapes.

The qualitative part of the brain used the main axis through the rooms as the primary vista, the cross axes as paths leading to intriguing places, geometrical shapes within each garden room that seemed to fall into natural patterns, while arrangements of borders and beds and parterres and vertical accents generated rhythm and rhyme to the ground plan.