Landscape Love Notes

A model for the perfect city, Julian Cope, and designing urban landscapes in a new way - what if women were taken into account from the start?

The Avebury circle does something extraordinary with space and light - it gathers the landscape into itself while simultaneously opening outward to the hills beyond. It's a masterclass in borrowed landscape, incorporating distant views into the immediate garden space

This is the first in the occasional series of Landscape Love Notes. If you’ve signed up for garden content, DON’T PANIC - these are occasional letters from places of inspiration, extraordinary places which feel part of the place they’re in. Places whose character you can almost touch, where the atmosphere conjures up something out of this world, or even other-worldly. Gardens will be back at the weekend!

The more I think about it, the more this does have loads to do with the design of gardens. In The New Romantic Garden, much of the message is about how we imbue a place with magic - if that is even possible. What’s happened to create that sense of place, without it being all about the designer.

A vast stone circle with a village in the middle of it

Overwhelmed and spine-tingled, that’s how it felt seeing for the first time the standing stones of Avebury - a vast stone circle with a village in the middle of it. Goodspooky. And here in the folds of the Wiltshire downs, where chalk meets sky, and Julian Cope has all sorts of names, fairly gynaecological, for how the creases of the land meet each other - there’s a great circle story. (There’s just so much to write about Julian Cope that I think it deserves a post of its own. My friend Nina actually saw him walking along at Avebury - how cool is that? Apparently he’s a GIANT).