online: 18 june 2011 modified: 11, 17 june 2011 2 june 2011 a landscaped garden
the Hill Garden
...i am near the centre-line of a symmetrically landscaped garden made in the plain forms of popular modernism... free of imposed meanings though incorporating the symmetry of Greek or Roman idea...
...sun high in sky...
...but soon a jovial man walks across the lawn to tell me he will be locking the garden gate in ten minutes...
...so i take last look at lawn, terrace, trees, shrubs and sky before leaving... the peace of this place is almost visible... as if each object is part of a single geometrical sculpture...
...before leaving i walked to a viewpoint from which one can see the church spire of Harrow-on-the-Hill (from which i once looked ten miles or so towards this spot)... then walking back across the terrace i stopped to watch insects that skate across the water surface... as if it were ice not surface tension that supports their slight weight per square millimetre...
...but the unspecial place outside the garden (where i've stopped to note this) seems more interesting... and various... than is any landscaped garden... however grand or imposing... or even peaceful...
...an irregular pathway between mixtures of flowering brambles, and ferns, beneath oaks and other trees... together embodying a far more irregular and secret peace and stillness... and unintended perhaps by any conscious mind...
...a hefty man in running clothes plods by... using the path as path... and looking at me, not at the surrounding semi-wilderness... though he and i are both parts of it...
...i move now to return on a hilly path through several clusters of pines or firs... which remind me of the illustrations in a childen's story book of long ago... with illustrations by Edmund Dulac...
for comfortable line length please set the window to about half of the screen width
You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you
respect the copyright of quotations.
If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please
send a copyright permission request to jcj 'at' publicwriting.net
(replace 'at' and spaces by the @ sign)
