HBF Part 1 - Life as Poetry

For those who don’t know me and are reading my work for the first time, a small disclaimer:
I am not a writer. I am an artist.

But I am an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in research, and over the past year, I’ve begun the process of sharing more of that research here in my blog and on my Instagram—I have begun to realise how silly it is to hide this side, it’s like showing you a film with no audio or subtitles, you may follow the story but never quite get all the details. So, I’m beginning to let my research breathe outside of notebooks, sketchbooks, and conversations, and attempt something I do actually enjoy doing… writing.

This year, I was incredibly fortunate to be awarded the Hugo Burge Foundation Botanical Art Residency, and for those not steeped in the art world, let me say—this is a big deal. This kind of opportunity gives both time and space which are incredibly hard to come by when working two jobs alongside your practice. I’ve been housed in a Hobbit Pod, offered a beautiful studio in a tower (The Lord of the Rings and Disney fan in me is still trying to grasp the surrealness of it all) and supported with a stipend to make this period of research possible…

The focus of my residency is a Walled Garden—a very real and historic one, nestled within the estate at Marchmont House, near Duns. But also, a walled garden as an idea. A container. A metaphor. A place where cultivation and control meet chaos and wildness, where human intention intertwines itself with the more-than-human world.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been researching walled gardens across Scotland—visiting, sketching, taking notes, asking questions. I want to understand not just their history, but how they are lived and used today. Who gardens them, who visits, who remembers them, who doesn’t.

If you’re curious about why gardens?, or my project, or want to read more about the gardens I’ve already visited, please follow the links. But for now, this is the beginning of my time at Hugo Burge Foundation. This chapter will chart the first week of listening—listening to the garden, to the gardeners, to the rhythms and routines of this place. Throughout my writing, you’ll find notes I’ve left for myself, key themes that I find are worth exploring further.

This is not a polished story. It’s a working one.

I find it funny that I’ve come to Marchmont Estate, as to get here I set off from Marchmont Edinburgh. A home away from home. Well, if I’m being frank it’s better than my home. The Foundation is idyllic and although I’ve only been here a week I don’t want to leave. Songbirds sing all day long, no road noise to compete with, I’ve heard barn owls at night, seen deer, bats, buzzards, kestrels and a hare even came and sat on my patio. But none of this amazing fauna would be here without the Walled Garden and the grounds that facilitate their lives.

Outside

Outside the walls of the Walled Garden, lies a vast wild-grass meadow as tall as my hip. It’s various species, all shades of browns, greens and yellows are not just beautiful to look at but provide food for birds and shelter for small animals, while also playing a crucial role in carbon capture and water management.

I meet up with Toby Loveday the head gardener to show me round the grounds and Garden. Toby decides what happens within the gardens and surrounding land. That freedom is amazing and generally unheard of.  He knew Hugo well so has the ability to pursue his vision. But the land and Garden are also not a memorial garden. Nor should a garden ever be stuck in time, a garden is always changing. ‘How do you decide what period of time you preserve?’ says Toby, there needs to be the flexibility for the garden to change is response to what drives us, what drives conservation, while also retaining the history of the vision of the space. Instead Toby, his team and the Foundation, try to find a space for all of it.

Following a mown path through the wild-grass meadow to the Jubilee gates that are the main entry to the Walled Garden, you really feel like you’re in amongst the grasses. They’re alive with the hum of insects, birds flit in and out, while the wind causes them to ripple and sway. It’s beautiful. Toby tells me that this vast space was derelict two years ago. You wouldn’t believe it now. It was only last year that the wild-grass meadow was sown. In September Northern Hay Meadow Wildflower mix will be added, a mix of seeds that are native to the borders and northern England. This time next year these grass-lands will hopefully be a riot of colour providing pollinator friendly flowers.

There will be an orchard here in the future, but not one for humans. Toby argued against a traditional orchard as we as humans don’t need that excess, instead the team here are prioritising flowering fruiting trees that the birds and insects will benefit from such as crab apple and elderberry. They are also creating rough grassland that will never be cut down low, to provide habitat for insects and small mammals which are a necessary food source for the barn owls and bats that live here. All are thought about. All are provided for.

Themes: native, cultivated wild, wider ecosystems and biodiversity

Inside

I’m guided by Toby inside the walls of the Garden. A Garden that is not just one space but many. The Jubilee Gates lead into Jubilee Avenue which runs directly from the gates to the far side, splitting the whole garden in two – not that you can actually see the whole garden all at once! Hedges and walls, break up the space into smaller Gardens, each with a distinct personality of their own.

The Garden has changed dramatically but also subtly over the last year. There used to be lots of things in the garden that were lovely but didn’t ‘marry together’ Toby tells me, trees were in odd places, sculptures had been plonked down without a thought for how they interact with the space around it. The importance for Toby is in getting these things to work together, creating a flow throughout the whole space. The Garden had never been designed as a whole, so it is incredible what has been done with the spaces already here.

There have been subtle changes, like centring a statue, and big changes like the total re-imagining of the kitchen garden. The Kitchen Garden used to be one big open space, which has now been broken up into two; a trellised enclosed Kitchen Garden, creating more herbaceous borders, and another wildflower meadow with a statue in the middle. Hugo and Toby decided on trellises, as the garden already had many walls and hedges. It took Toby days to measure out what was needed, and they have been painstakingly engineered by Woodworks from Curriemuir so that the top of the trellises runs perfectly with the top of the outer wall of the Walled Garden. Each joint, every single one, perfectly angled to form one continuous line.

The alternative, a stepped approach would have been too harsh on the gaze, interfering with the sleek symmetry that Toby is striving to achieve in the garden. These sleek simple lines draw you in. My mind goes to Tim Ingold and his writing on lines – lines drawing us to see. In The Life of Lines, Ingold describes that life is not made of isolated points but woven through continuous paths of connection.

He critiques the "network" metaphor, which suggests a pre-defined structure of connections. Instead, he proposes the "meshwork". This “meshwork” theory describes life as an interlaced web of lines—human and more-than-human lives converging, diverging, entwining. Walls in walled gardens may impose structure, but the lines of roots, vines, insects, gardeners, wind, rain—they all criss-cross that order, creating a living conversation.

Life, in Ingold's view, is lived along these "lines of becoming" – paths and trajectories that are constantly intertwining and diverging. These lines are not just connections between points but are processes in themselves, full of loose ends and open possibilities. 

In conversation with Drawing Matter, Ingold asserts that drawing is fundamentally about following movement—tracing the paths in our world, our gardens, our stories. For me, drawing within the Walled Garden, the Garden’s structure as a network of these lines—paths, walls, hedges, roots, plants and people—opens new layers of meaning.

Lines are a natural part of gardens Toby tells me, you naturally go towards lines, but you can soften these with plants, this idea of lines is very important to what we do. Hugo was into order and symmetry but at the same time this wildness and chaos’. The Garden has be carefully curated, each corner gives you a new viewpoint, it’s gardens within gardens providing endless surprises and new perspectives. Borders, walls, hedges, avenues, colonnades, mown paths, all create lines that draw the eye. Yet the garden feels cosy, the lines aren’t harsh, they seem almost natural. The team have done an amazing job as no-matter what direction you look there is a sense of symmetry, of calm, but also a sense of wildness.

Theme: viewpoints, balance, symmetry, lines

Two beautifully historic aspects of the garden, the glasshouses and the Venus border, with its beautifully mown lawn in front, frame on two sides what is possibly the most unusual part of the Garden. It’s been described as ‘Tellytubby land’ – a series of mown mounds and pathways surrounded by wildflower meadow.

The formal balustrade that marks the opposite side of the Venus border and mown lawn once looked out of place said Toby, but it now works beautifully offsetting the formal garden with something that is incredibly contemporary. Toby wants to push this contrast even further by making the lawn croquette standard.

Mowed lawns are a British institution. Other cultures do not have the lawns we do for two reasons; the first is that the UK's temperate climate is well-suited for cool-season grasses, which thrive in the spring and autumn, giving us the lush, soft, green grass that is wildly different to other places around the world; secondly, mown lawns are a luxury, and have a historical association with wealth, exclusive to those that could allow for land to be used for pleasure, not for growing crops to support a household or a working space.

You could expect that an estate like Marchmont House would fall into the trap of perfectly manicured lawns and beds, preserving its history, its control. It's on these kinds of estates that you can historically witness, as Ruha Benjamin states in Imagination Manifesto, two competing worldviews ‘life as property or life as poetry’, one of which is responsible for the planetary crises we now face. Well Toby and his team at the Hugo Burge Foundation are definitely ‘life as poetry’. The Garden is a paradise, but not just one for humans. There are nods to our history, areas of mown lawn beautifully offset the borders, and balance the meadows that fill many of the other spaces, their mown walkways preserve the meadow and allow for us to fully appreciate being in amongst these beautiful plants without the fear of trampling them or disturbing those who live in them.

Again we see balance, historical and contemporary ideals of space that beautiful offset each other and done in such a way that it can be appreciated by all, bringing us physically closer to nature. ‘formal and informal next to each other makes it all the more special, and all the more beautiful’ says Toby.

Theme: history, contemporary

I’ve realised this has gotten long, so I’m splitting this into parts. The next parts will look will look closely at at the history of Walled Gardens, each Garden with the Garden, what is being grown, and what it means to those who tend the soil.