Design, at best, is an emergent process - and essentially so when it is about gardens. As much as designed gardens at events like the Chelsea Flower Show are inspiring and lovely to look at, they are snapshots for the week of the show. Deterministic design works for a fleeting moment. Making a real garden is a rich practice of design. It is at the end of the year that I have spent on a new stage of putting out probing designs on Bron Ceris’s garden. The coming seasons will reveal what works and what will be changed: a process of reflection that will come sitting in the garden or weeding a flower bed - and in narrating stories in this blog.
Cynefin is a Welsh word that does not easily translate. it is often translated as habitat - but that is only a beginning. It has the same notion that sheep farmers have of hefted: a flock of sheep that know their bit of mountain that is passed down from the ewe to her lambs. In Welsh it carries more meaning. In humans it carries with it a sense of place, home-ness, of shared cultural knowledge, a belonging. Cynefin has also been used by Dave Snowden to describe approaches to managing complexity. Within this framework there is a description for working with the complex - a situation which is new, where causes and effects are expected but are as yet unknown. This describes the situation when you are making garden. Will the plant like the spot? Will it work with its neighbours? What extra interventions will be needed to sustain and keep it viable? Does it fit with the life habits of those for whom the garden is home (wild and domestic)?
Cynefin suggests a way to deal with the complex. You need to perform safe-to-fail experiments. Take many readings/reflections of the consequences and then amplify the successes and attenuate the failures. This is the approach I am taking in Bron Ceris.
As with all design I work with known constraints and opportunities - which will be described as we blog further. And as with all design - we will be working towards the desirable. However that begs the question “what is desirable in this context?” It has to satisfy the requirements of Sue and I, it has to fulfill my creative needs, it needs to continue to be fun and challenging, it has to live within a budget, allow us to go on holidays and balance carefully the joy of gardening with the chores of gardening. Low maintenance gardens are for the surrounds of office buildings, roundabouts and public conveniences - gardening is part of the pleasure. I want to create wow-factors, I also want to create space which is out-of-time - a chance for garden mindfulness.
In some ways the garden is not Cynefin. Is there such a thing as a traditional Welsh garden? I don’t think so. Bron Ceris is a garden full of the exotic. On the other hand, there is a phrase I am trying to understand: wabi sabi. A phrase Wikipedia tells me that “The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". But I suspect it is a bit like trying to translate Cynefin.