Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Maggie’s Centre
Tom McDonald Avenue
Dundee DD2 1NH
Scotland

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation has been described as one of the most original and important gardens of the 21st century. Located on a thirty acre site in Scotland, the garden was created by Charles and his late wife Maggie as a place to explore some of the fundamental aspects of the universe; a place where the garden would totally absorb and engage the visitor, appealing to all of the senses, including the sense of humour. According to Charles,

“when we began the garden I was not concerned with the larger issues of the cosmos. But over the years they came more and more to the fore and I have used them as a spur to think about nature and to contemplate and speculate on the origins of the universe. And in that respect this garden is part of a long historical tradition. Japanese Zen gardens, Persian paradise gardens, the English and French Renaissance gardens played out the story of the cosmos as it
was understood then. So the idea of the garden as a microcosm of the universe is quite a familiar one. In fact I feel it is the most compelling motive to create a garden. What is a garden if not a celebration of our place in the universe?”.

The Chinese philosophy of gardens was a major early influence for both Charles and Maggie. Together they agreed on a central theme of snaking curves that reflected both the images of Chinese landscape painting and the Scottish hills that surrounded them; they created a “landscape of waves”. This feature also represents one of the scientific theories that has dominated many of Charles’ designs for the garden and that is the new science of complexity; the finding that everything in the universe is self-organizing, following one harmonic pattern or another. This is reflected in the repeated use of the spiral throughout the garden.

Following this is a series of “dragon lakes”; the first of which was dug out with the remaining earth shaped into a giant “snail mound” that still dominates the garden. The mound, several stories high, has a narrow path that curves around the perimeter and is a feat of engineering and turf maintenance. From the top, one can gaze down onto the garden and out into the surrounding hillsides. Giant boulders were brought in to create a waterfall.

Charles renamed and transformed the existing elements of the grounds, dividing up the landscape into overlapping gardens. The tennis court, surrounded by a high wall of Cyprus became The Sense of Fair Play; the kitchen garden, The Garden of Common Sense; and a woods planted many years ago by Maggie’s father and filled with the nests of noisy crows was dubbed The Garden of Taking Leave of Your Senses. It was there that they placed a folly constructed from a model for a famous post-modern building designed by one of their many architect friends. They called it The Nonsense and Charles regards this as the first step in his creation of a hybrid medium, somewhere between sculpture, literature, architecture, and landscape- a first example of cross-coding he was to christen Cosmogenic Art.

A large glass and white brick greenhouse borders The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It is an imposing structure that would seem at home in any sizable, expensively maintained garden, except for one important detail. Across the long peak of the roof cut out of steel and standing out white against the blue sky is a series of mathematical equations that Charles explains “as the
basic laws that govern and breathe life into the universe.”

The section of the garden known as Heaven-Hell was designed as a primeval wilderness garden. A beautiful arched red bridge, one of several in the garden, takes the visitor across the stream that cuts through this area. Along its banks Maggie planted gunnera with its gigantic flopping leaves that threaten to engulf the passerby. Several large trees stricken with Dutch Elm disease were left to lie where they had fallen. It was to be “a place of death and rebirth” and located in a quiet corner of the wilderness garden next to the red jumping bridge is a statue of Maggie sculpted by Charles’ sister.

The kitchen garden originally consisted of six rectangles which Charles has constructed into a DNA garden. Through his research he discovered that DNA and RNA are the basic words of nature and therefore suitable elements for one to celebrate in a garden. Holding on to his and Maggie’s original plan to use the six sections of the garden to reflect the five senses and the sixth sense of human intuition, Charles commissioned six sculptural pieces that combined the form of the double helix with an object representing the particular sense for that section. Working with his gardener, Alistair, they chose plantings that would relate to the different sense presented in each section, combining perennials for continuous colour with the annually planted vegetables.

In one of these six sections called Sense of Touch, a metal hand waves back and forth beckoning the visitor. Planted around it are a combination of thorns, thistles nettles, the prickly plants that assault the fingers and lambs ears and dock to assuage the pain. Two types of wild strawberries are planted below a large aluminum mouth and tongue attached to a DNA spiral in The Sense of Taste garden. The Sense of Sight has at its centre a grass mound, in the shape of a double helix. Around the back hidden from immediate view is the black cave-like entrance to a secret grotto, “a place of escape into another world.” Small holes aimed to catch the sun at high noon project an “M” on to the wall at certain moments of the year.

The Universe Cascade is located on a slope that runs down the back of the garden forming an axis between the snail mound and the rear of the house and consists of a steep series of steps representing the unfolding of the universe in 25 jumps as it developed across billions of years. A giant rock and a bench for contemplation were installed at each level for individuals to use as they climbed steeply upwards. The staircase is an extraordinarily dramatic structure rising up from a large pond, water pouring down the centre as it criss-crosses the steep hillside, and ends in an open pavilion at the top. And at each level, beautiful and mysterious objects and design elements remind the visitor of just how extraordinary the process of creation that produced our universe, our home, truly is.

“Gardens are like whispering games in which the key is to pass on meaning even as it changes. They may reach momentary equilibrium, but they should never be pickled or remain static. True respect to our project would be shown by continuing and transforming the plots because a garden is never finished…. Here in the garden we can celebrate the beauty and organization of the universe, and what better task can a person engage in.” - Charles Jencks

*Charles Jencks is an internationally acclaimed architectural theorist, critic and designer, and is credited for coining the term “post-modernism”. His books include; the best-selling The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (sixth edition 1991), The New Paradigm in Architecture (2002), Architecture Today (third edition, 1994), The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (second edition, 1997), Modern Movements in Architecture ] (second edition, 1985), Signs, Symbols and Architecture (1980) as well as over 25 books on contemporary building and post-modern thought. His architecture, landscape design and furniture explore in different media the ideas developed in his writing.

Born in Baltimore in 1939, Charles attended Harvard University where he received his BA in English Literature and his Masters in Architecture. In 1970, he received his Doctorate in Architectural History from London University where he studied under the modern architectural historians Siegfried Giedon and Reyner Banham. After graduation, Charles spent much of his time lecturing and teaching in England, where he met his wife-to-be, the Scottish fashion designer Maggie Keswick. They married in 1978 and after her father’s death in 1982, the couple spent a considerable amount of their time at her parents’ estate, in Southwest Scotland, where Maggie had spent much of her childhood.

Clare, Maggie’s mother, was a keen gardener and had designed and planted a number of beautiful traditional gardens, which are still maintained to this day, on the property. A loving and generous mother-in-law, she stepped aside and gave Charles her blessings, her property and her gardener, as he began his anything-but-traditional approach to transforming the landscape into what would eventually become known as the “Garden of Cosmic Speculation”.
According to Charles, the whole undertaking of renovating the garden started
with a very practical motivation: Maggie wanted to excavate a swamp at the back
end of the property to create a swimming pond for their two children, John and
Lily.

“As we were digging out the pond we were suddenly confronted with all the mud that was piling up. So we discussed what shape all this earth could take and as usual, we could not reach a quick conclusion.”

Charles’s and Maggie’s relationship had begun over an argument on design and
ideology and the pleasure of “trading opinions” continued throughout their
joint creation of the garden. “After all”, Charles has remarked, “you can only
learn something from someone with whom you disagree”.

According to Charles,

“The early influences in the garden are somewhat Chinese as we wanted to
do what they do, which is to pull in the exterior environment and, in our case, it’s a
series of mountains in the far distance. The Chinese call this “borrowing the landscape” and these influences came from Maggie, whose childhood had been divided between Scotland and Shanghai where her father worked for the family trading company, Jardine Matheson. As an adult, she had written a seminal book on the subject of Chinese gardens”.

As the shapes of earth and water were debated, it became clear to Charles and Maggie that the forms the landscape took should become part of an overall program for the property that surrounded them. From this, and his work on a book, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, Charles also saw the opportunity to create a new grammar of landscape, based on science.

“For two thousand years, Gardeners have been taking inspiration from the current
view of cosmos. Today this has changed from the view that only particles are fundamental. What we now know is that waves, or wave forms spreading throughout the universe, that unite events in the universe, are equal to the particles. This is called the wave-particle duality. So I saw that the wave form was a metaphor of nature that was as deep the particle and this led to the metaphor for the whole garden of “a landscape of waves”.

This style of thought influenced the language of design Charles was employing in all of his work, including the creation of his personal garden. Charles believed that “contemporary science is such a great impetus for creativity because it is telling us the truth about the way the universe is”. And (he) decided to take these discoveries and give them artistic expression here in the garden, to speculate on and celebrate the laws of the universe-the laws are complex, and beautiful. As Einstein said, “God may be subtle, but is not malicious”, so, we might invent a new language of landscape to express these new discoveries.

Charles explains that as
“the garden developed since 1988, so too did the sciences of complexity and this allowed a dynamic interaction between the unfolding universe, a progressing science and my questioning design. When I started the garden the universe was thought to be made up of superstrings and to be about 15 billion years old. By the time I completed the major layout in 2002, the prime
candidate for the basic structure was a vibrating membrane and the universe had become a multiverse with a 13.7 billion year history. So theories will be outdated but that does offer some rewards. They relate us to the unfolding cosmic process of understanding, tying us into evolutionary history and they contain some amount of truth that will persist in the future. whatever the case, I continue to search and that investigation is a spiritual, cognitive and inevitable journey. So a Garden of Cosmic Speculation provides these partial hints of truths as well as other pleasures. It reveals the universe to be unbelievable, fantastic, provocative and surprising.”

Charles and Maggie’s joy and energy in creating the garden took an abrupt turn in the spring of 1993 when Maggie began to experience terrible back pain and fever. The breast cancer she had successfully fought five years before had returned, this time spreading to her liver and bones, and she was informed by her doctor that she only had three months to live. It was a prognosis neither Maggie nor Charles were prepared to accept. Her children needed a mother, and she was determined to fight the disease with all the resources she could, including the post-modern theories she and Charles had developed in recent years past.

Charles and Maggie rejected the outdated “modern” hospital approach of treating the body like a machine with a single problem and instead applied a post-modern concept of cancer as a multi-caused disease that needed combined therapies to be effectively fought. Maggie turned her considerable energy and imagination to seeking out and making use of the alternative and complementary therapies that suited her particular needs and illness. Her experiences formed the basis of a booklet she wrote called A View from the Front Line, which discusses the terror of fighting for your own life and compares it to being dropped behind enemy lines and searching for the front without a map. It explores the empowerment the patient can experience from the active involvement in one’s own treatment. Maggie fully believed this approach could prolong life and provide the cancer patient with the means to never “lose the joy of living through the fear of dying”. A View also looks at the benefits that can be derived from just having a pleasant welcoming place to recover from bad news or debilitating treatment as well as provides information and referral services.

As part of her quest for alternative treatments, Maggie visited several healing gardens in California. Both Charles and Maggie came to believe that architecture and gardens play an enormous role in the healing process and Maggie stretched the three months the doctor had given her into two years and four months before the cancer took her life. Just enough time for her to actualize her dream.

Based on her text, Blueprint for a Cancer Caring Centre and the money she had raised before her death, Charles, in collaboration with some of Maggie’s friends and associates, was able to open the first cancer caring centre at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh in 1996. Another centre in Glasgow followed soon after and there are now 10 more in various stages of development. At these hospital-based centres no cancer patient will have to suffer from receiving a shattering diagnosis and then be left sitting in a dank corridor as Maggie did. Now patients can receive the help they need to navigate through the difficult territory of treatment in the peaceful and bright atmosphere of these beautiful architect-designed centers, all of which are
surrounded by the calming atmosphere of a garden.

The centre in Glasgow, known as Maggie’s Centre, was designed by Charles with a
mound and a spiral DNA sculpture in the centre of the Garden. Both which mirror elements similar to the garden he and Maggie created together. The red stones indicating DNA molecules were gathered by Charles from Maggie’s beloved River Nith that runs next to the Garden.

Upon Maggie’s death, Charles vowed to complete the gardens. “I owed it to her. In a way, through death, she started to become my muse and I would carry on enjoyable discussions and arguments with her memory”. In a quiet corner of the wilderness garden next to the red jumping bridge he placed a statue of Maggie sculpted by his sister. Picking up his ideas where they had
been left, he began work on the DNA garden and the universe cascade, two of the gardens most distinctive features.

The work on the kitchen garden had been half-finished and as he resumed the project, he imagined what would be appropriate objects to put in the centre of each of the six rectangles that formed the basis of the garden’s design. Intrigued by the work of the Human Genome Project and the claims made regarding the potential impact that its discoveries could have on understanding diseases like cancer, Charles set to work transforming this part of the property into a DNA garden.

“Through my research I discovered that DNA and RNA are the basic words of nature and therefore suitable elements for us to celebrate in a garden. Also fitting is the double helical structure of DNA which affords a beautiful climbing frame for plants.”

Holding on to his and Maggie’s original plan to use the six sections of the garden to reflect the five senses, and the sense of feminine intuition, Charles designed six sculptural pieces that combined the form of the double helix with an object representing the particular sense for that section. Working with his gardener, Alistair, plants were selected that related to the different
sense presented in each section, combining perennials for continuous colour with the annually planted vegetables.

Charles now divides his time between lecturing, writing and building in the USA and UK. He has lectured at over forty universities throughout the world including Peking, Shanghai, Paris (Ecole des Beaux-Arts), Tokyo, Milan, Venice, Frankfurt, Quebec, Montreal, Oslo, Warsaw, Barcelona, Lisbon, Zurich, Vienna and Edinburgh; and in US at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale and various public museums. He is the author of many articles in professional journals
including Architectural Forum, Architecture Review, Domus, A&U, and AD. Charles is also an occasional contributor to: London Sunday Times Magazine, Encounter, Times Literary Supplement, The Observer and is the Independent.Editorial consultant with Architectural Design and an editor with Academy Editions, London. He is also a Member of Academy Forum with the Royal Academy. In 1992, Charles was awarded the NARA Gold Medal for Architecture and the Gulbenkian Prize, 2004 for Museum Projects, for the Landform UEDA.

Over the years, Charles has appeared on numerous television programs in the USA and UK, and has written two feature films for the BBC (one on Le Corbusier and the other on Frank Lloyd Wright & Michael Graves). Programs he has appeared on include: Kings of Infinite Space (1983); Symbolic Architecture (1985); Space on Earth (1986); Battle of Paternoster Square (1987); Pride of Place (1988); A Second Chance (1989); Let the People Choose (1990); the BBC Late show: New Moderns (1990); La Villette (1991); Tokyo (1992 BP Arts Journalism TV Award); Culture Debate (1991); Frank Gehry and Los Angeles (1992); BBC: Gardens of the Mind (1991); and The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Border Television Documentary (1997).

*Much of the information found in this section is taken from the following website: http://www.cperspectives.org/Invitees/charles_jencks.htm