Unlike architecture, which requires solidity to provide shelter over time regardless of style, landscaped gardens are ephemeral by nature. They may possess a degree of flamboyancy and fantasy expressive of the philosophical tone of their times and their creators without concerns for function. This is particularly true among the rolling hills of southwest Scotland, where in Portrack, just north of Dumfries near the English border, Charles Jencks, the American theorist, architect, and (increasingly) landscape architect, and his late wife, Maggie Keswick, created a 30-acre garden on a family estate that engages both the mind and the senses. Known as the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, it was completed for the most part in 2002. Every landscape design by Jencks, no matter how bucolic in appearance, incorporates a symbolically loaded theory, since for him, traveling and creating gardens is a challenging and liberating intellectual pursuit.
In this pastoral setting at Portrack, however, suddenly one hears the long drone of a train whistle as freight cars rattle by just beyond the garden. Although Keswick’s father had screened out Railtrack’s right-of-way across his property with a double row of poplars that rustle soothingly in the wind, the London–Glasgow line makes its presence felt as trains speed along the garden’s edge before crossing the River Nith.
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