Gardens Always Mean Something Else

Gardens Always Mean Something Else (A la Ronde, Exmouth, 2009) Text by Phil Smith Performed by Francesca Falchi-Pereira, Rakeen Silawi and Phil Smith

(At the shop, the audience are given an envelope with a map and instructions. They are asked to walk a winding route through what is now the gravel surround of the house, but was once Oswald Reichel’s ‘wild walk’ – although they are not told that yet.) 1/ (I am sitting on the bench beneath an ash tree, dressed in working clothes, blue overalls and scruffy t shirt, wearing a protective helmet and faceguard. I am holding a half eaten sandwich. I am using small pieces of smoothed broken glass 1

from the seashore to make a pattern on the bench. Beside me are labelled pots of materials: sand, sea shells, feathers, lime and seaweed. When I see the audience gather by me I signal that I have seen them, then pack away my sandwich into a plastic food container and the materials into a similar container. I pack these into a small blue rucksack, which also carries books to which I later refer.) Phil Smith: I once answered an advert for a gardener. I was anxious because I knew nothing about trees or plants. (I take off the helmet and faceguard.) But I needn’t have worried. After nine months working on the job I still knew nothing about trees or plants. What they really meant was “anyone who will do as they are told” – labourers – we were sent out in gangs, pushing and driving grass cutting machines – Ransons and Hayters – strimming the verges on Bristol’s council estates. I worked with Cheese, so called because he always had a smile on his face, but he wasn’t happy, Shark – I can’t remember why - the General – his surname was Patton - and I was the Citizen, because my surname is Smith and I had views to the left of Genghis Khan. I didn’t really enjoy my work cutting grass – it wasn’t the manual labour, I’d done that before, I was a porter – but there’d been a camaraderie among the porters, the porters looked after each other, looked out for each other, even lied for each other, but cutting the grass everything was a wind-up, a sarcasm, a kid-on. Of course, sociologists would have put the porters and the grass cutters together in the same social class, the same demographic, the same status, C4 or whatever – but among the porters we had status, we had class, we were a demographic. Working on the grass, we were just human dust. 2

I want to show you the layers of this garden. (Point out the rockery.) Look at the rockery behind you… when I came here with Salli and with Kristin the gardener here, we were remarking on what a jumble this rockery looks, as if it had fallen apart and been repaired without much thought, but when we looked at a photograph inside the house, taken 120 years ago, the rockery looked then pretty much as it looks today. Things may look informal, chaotic, jumbled in this garden – but they may have been planned that way. Let me show you something less chaotic… 2/ (Take the audience down the steps of the ‘haha’. As they pass along the path on top of the ‘haha’ the audience see Checky and

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Rakeen, dressed in generic ‘nineteenth century’ servants’ costumes – black skirts and white blouses. They perform an action on top of the mound to the side of the house – ‘a Regency viewing platform’ – observing into the distance using a telescope and a pair of binoculars. I gather the audience around a molescarer by the base of the ‘haha’.)

If we just wait here for a moment, we’ll hear a sound. (Sound from mole-scarer.) There it is – now, any idea what that is? It’s a solar-powered mole-scarer, pumping that high-pitched squeal into the ground… it keeps the moles from undermining this – the haha – I’ll come back to what this is later, but now I want to use it as a metaphor for the garden… because it makes two levels, then the moles try to erode it, and then the National Trust intervene, putting in the mole-scarer to keeps the erosion at bay … and that’s pretty much the history of this place: Two layers, an erosion and a conservation. And now I’m going to take you to somewhere that has all four of these elements – and like the moles it’s hidden away.

3/ (Take the audience down the path through the meadow, to the fence to the ‘shelter belt’, then, asking one of the audience to hold the orange helmet, I use a key to open the padlock to a gate into the ‘shelter belt’ of trees.) 4

Before we go in – you will not be alone. There are lots of slow worms in here – they look like snakes, but they’re lizards without legs - they won’t hurt you, but you might hurt them if you tread on them. When I was strimming the verges on Bristol council estates one of the saddest things was sweeping up the cuttings and finding a dead slow worm. I don’t want to add to that carnage. (I lead the audience through the trees to remains of the kitchen garden wall.) Wall. (Patting the wall) This is the wall of a kitchen garden, built at the end of the eighteenth century: a sheltered garden that provided vegetables and fruit for the house – and there were also hothouses and an orangery behind here, where there are houses and private gardens now – so there were exotic fruits as well as the usual vegetables. Here, help yourself to something familiar or something exotic. (I take from a cooler case a container of raw vegetables and cut fruit. Carrot, eden fruit, limes, lemons, figs, etc.) Now, this kitchen garden was put here by the first occupants of A la Ronde – Jane and Mary Parminter – one of whom possibly designed the house and grounds. Some of you may know the story of how the two cousins, Jane and Mary, inherited wealth from Jane’s father, John, who traded wine and owned factories that made glass and later concrete in Lisbon, in Portugal. Jane was born in Lisbon in 1750. They must have had a good life there, but in 1755 an earthquake razed Lisbon to the ground, and then drowned it under a tidal wave, a tsunami, the glass factory was destroyed… but the family survived and their fortune was remade, they rebuilt their factory, but switched production from 5

glass to quick setting concrete used in the rebuilding of Lisbon. And it was these profits that Jane and Mary used to fund a tenyear long Grand Tour of Europe, setting off in 1785 and travelling through a Europe which after 1789 was rent with revolutions and upheaval. When they arrived in England they brought back with them cases full of souvenirs and they built A la Ronde partly as a home, but partly as a place to display what they had found in Europe – for themselves, but also to show to friends and to their many visitors. In fact, A la Ronde is like this kitchen garden: with some things local and familiar, and others exotic - like the shabtis from Egyptian graves or rock crystals from Italian sea shores. Well, that’s the first layer – the second layer is not so visible; in fact you’ve already walked a part of it. That walk that you did on the gravel up by the house – that is part of the second layer and is the work of the only man to occupy A la Ronde, the Reverend Oswald Reichel. 6

A theologian, a world-historian, he arrived here under a cloud of sexual scandal. Reichel modernised the house, but he kept the gardens pretty much as they were. Not just out of obligation. This kitchen garden, for example, may well have chimed with his study of the philosopher Epicurus, Reichel translated a major book on Epicurus. Epicurus was an Athenian philosopher, whose school of philosophy met in his kitchen garden. Other Athenian schools met on public property – the Academy, the Lyceum – and that meant that they were open to interference from local politicians, but because Epicurus taught on private property he had independence. And independence is very important at A la Ronde. Epicurus would use the example of his plants to teach the transience of all things and the disappointments and anxiety that came from seizing on short-lived pleasures, for Epicurus believed in long-term pleasure, freedom from anxiety, and believed that truth could only be found through the senses. Now this would have appealed to Oswald Reichel, who was nothing if not a sensual man – for his writing on canon law and the Christian Sacraments makes clear that the body and its senses are crucial - baptism, marriage, communion, the burial of the dead - the body is immersed in water, marriage is meaningless until it is consummated, until the two have become one flesh, communion must be eaten, and the body must be in the ground. Well, you’ve already been using your senses I hope – tasting, perhaps smelling… but next I want to you to use the sense which is privileged above all others at A la Ronde – looking, seeing… appearances are very important here, but we need to go back to the meadow to do our looking… 7

4/ (The audience return to the meadow.) So, I’d like you help me look for a plant with a very tiny blue flower, bluish almost mauve colour, with small nettle-like leaves. I have found it earlier today, but it’s very small and there aren’t many of them at the moment. (Someone eventually identifies one.) Ah, excellent – now there it is, everyone gather round so that you can see. There. It’s a Germander Speedwell. I’m going to come back to this flower, but first let me set it in the context of this meadow… which is pretty much today as it was in the Parminters’s time … Except for one key thing – there would have been two cows and fourteen sheep. (While I am speaking Checky and Rakeen appear on the far side of the meadow, looking as if they are waist high in meadow grass. They wear diving masks and snorkels and they use shovels to, apparently, dig into the ground. As they dig they seem to sink lower and lower in the ground, then emerging to pour sand from one bucket to another. They repeat these actions through most of this sequence.) Now, the Parminters thought a lot about the ‘look’ of this place, but it is also a place of work – out here it was agricultural, but in the house also there was work, they created extraordinary decorations – using simple, found and trashed materials: sand, seaweed, glass, feathers, shells – they didn’t order these 8

decorations from a craftsman, they worked – they made them themselves. And so with this meadow – it’s aesthetic, but it’s also about work. So, let me read you something about work, by someone who never did any: (Read from book – this passage (below) has been pasted in - so I appear to be reading from a book of middle-brow poetic writings on gardens.)

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature… in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. …A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Part 3, Chapter 7.)

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Well, I’m not sure if we have the best of bees here, but we certainly have one of the rarest – it’s a mining bee, Andrena Labiata, it lives in small holes in the ground – it’s the Ernie Wise of bees, it has short, fat, hairy legs… and its flower of choice is the Germander Speedwell. Now, the Speedwell is so called because its petals fall off at the least bump - hence, “Speedwell”. Epicurus would have liked the Germander Speedwell; not only is it fragile, but its transient - its flower lasting only a couple of days, hopefully in which time it’s been fertilised by pollen from a bee or drone fly. However, if it rains, the flower of the Germander Speedwell closes, and then everything changes – the anthers mature and release their pollen, and though the mouth of the flower never opens, self-fertilization takes place inside. Now, it might be tempting to make a connection with Jane and Mary Parminter here – for they closed this house to male occupancy, insisting that only unmarried women should ever live here, and we might say that there’s something missing here: the worker bee, the male, the miner … but I think that would be wrong – The Parminters might have been self-fertilising in an aesthetic sense - creating works of great beauty… but they were not closed flowers, they were not reclusive, they were public figures, they brought the world here, and the masculine is not excluded either – it’s interesting that Oswald Reichel did not change everything, there were many things he seems to have felt comfortable with. (Setting off, then turn back…) O, by the way… Germander Speedwell, is also the name of a poet – although she calls herself a “word-player” – she takes 10

audiences on what she calls ‘Wayward Walks’ where at significant points along the way she stops and favours the audience with her strange musings – personally, I can’t see the attraction, but there you go…. here’s a short extract from one of her pieces, it’s about globalised cargo on the Thames, every piece of which would have had its equivalent in the Parminters’ day and found its way here: “Dry bulks, brake dust, slop oils, wood pulp; Palletised bananas, Daihatsus and apples Legumes, lumber Barley and butter …ingredients from Sweden for newspaper inks; Shipments of eucalyptus, for Kleenex to make tissues… Ballast and bitumen, cement clinker and gypsum… Helicopter gunships as components in containers Assembled at Thamesport and sent to the Gulf War; …While the remains of Concorde are removed by river Tugged out of London and up to Edinburgh For the Museum of Flight, to remember the future.” I need you to make another imaginary walk… 5/ (I lead the audience westward along the lower path towards the West corner of the existing grounds, approaching the point where the present path connects with the route of the original 11

Parminter perimeter/introductory path. Pause, where the opening to the Parminter path is visible.) You remember that winding walk you did up by the house – Well, that route would once have been a narrow pebbled path, closed in by tall shrubs and shadowy bushes, shadowy and gloomy, you would never have been quite sure what was around the corner, until you reached that chaotic rockery. It was called a “wild walk” and it was introduced by Oswald Reichel… Now, obviously, the feeling of that walk has gone … but if you look ahead of you now, the walk here is quite shadowy and wild. So, I’d like you to walk this path, without me, and I will meet you again, up where the path bends round towards the house… I

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want you to get this experience because you will need to use it later – so enjoy not knowing what is coming around the next bend… (I leave the audience to walk the next part alone. Along this shadowy, enclosed path they meet Rakeen and Checky, coming along the path in the opposite direction, one carries one large and two small stuffed models of fish, the other a copper-coloured round tray covered in sand. They say a few words of greetings in Portuguese to the audience.) 6/ (I meet the audience at the corner of the path, where it turns towards the house.)

Just here, Kristin, the present gardener here, showed me a clump of Spanish Bluebells… they’re the first to appear in the garden… the flowers have gone now, but you can see them – here – they’re a rather hardier version of the indigenous bluebell, they have a thicker stem, and when it hybrids the Spanish features tend to predominate… so I understand there’s a diversity argument about protecting English bluebells… of which there are plenty down there in the lower parts of the garden… but I do feel uneasy about any talk of alien invaders, Japanese Knotweed, Himalayan Balsam, particularly when I hear of “Rhodi-bashing”, which has an unfortunate echo to my middle-aged ears. So, usually, when I hear something like this I alert the audience to a really pernicious interloper and dominating invader that we should truly be worried about - first entered this country in Cornwall from mainland Europe, and then spreading slowly, but remorselessly across the country, about 150 metres each year,

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and once it puts its roots down it can be around for hundreds of years – I’m referring of course to the English oak. (While I am talking Rakeen and Checky each carries a large mirror along the path at the bottom of the meadow, flashing sunlight.) But rather than that, what is most interesting here is that these bluebells are just as much from Portugal as Spain… and in one sense Jane Parminter was just as much a Portuguese export as these bluebells. So, let’s go and study a little more closely the work of that Portuguese export… (I lead the audience up to the gate overlooking the car park, close to the house.) Now, you’ve just been on part of the original path put here by the Parminters – this wasn’t unusual at the time, to put in an introductory path, to introduce visitors to an estate – but what’s crucial here is what this path took people to see. Because this isn’t the original path here at all, the original path went around the back of the car park, there… and there were some ornaments there, there’s a plinth still there, behind the trees there, next to the coach space, and there were two of them, possibly with Roman urns, then the path curled round to a bee garden with exotic specimen trees – figs, walnuts, etc., probably past some obelisks, past the kitchen garden, and, crucially, through no less than three orchards, which gave this place a hint of the Garden of Eden (with slow worms, rather than snakes). But up here there was another path. It ran from the house, across the introductory path at the back of the car park and then a hundred and fifty, two hundred yards, 14

across the fields to a chapel - called ‘Point In View’. Now, that chapel was built by the Parminter cousins – it’s still there - it looks like a cross between a space ship and a pyramid, ancient and futuristic - and around it is a manse, a schoolroom and some almshouses. Now it was built by the Parminters, but the reason is important: first call on the almhouses was given to converted Jewesses, and the schoolroom was there for the Christian education of their children. Now, look at the eight-sided dome on the top of the house, many people believed this was modelled after the eight-sided dome on the Cathedral at Ravenna which celebrates a legislator who forced Jews to renounce their religion on pain of death. And, finally, according to Parminter tradition, the oaks in this garden are only to be cut down when it is time to make boats to return the converted Jews to Palestine. For some Christians this return is a requirement for the coming of the Kingdom of God. So, on my first performance walk here, I argued that at least part of the first layer of A la Ronde is a machine for bringing on the end of the world and ushering in a future paradise… But I think I missed something.

Look at the house again – like the chapel it is both futuristic and ancient at the same time, like the Concorde in Germander Speedwell’s poem. But when I made my first performance here I only saw the futuristic element, I missed the thing that this building remembers… but I don’t think it’s something that you can see, or find a record of… it’s something that was here, but never symbolised… so, that’s a bit of a problem for me… the best I can do is shoe you a memorial to something that’s missing.

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(I lead the group off across the gravel, past the entrance to the house and to the modern obelisk.)

7/ (At the obelisk.) This modern obelisk is a pointer to what’s missing – look at the inscription… it says it replaces an obelisk that stood 200 yards to the West, which would probably place it around the kitchen garden or a little further round where we stood before you went alone along the path. It’s like a mirror that reflects something that’s no longer there.

One of the strangest jobs I did when I was working as a so-called ‘gardener’ – and I did this on my own, I think I was the only one they would trust to do it - was to strim the grave of a slave – Scipio Africanus – who would have been a slave in Bristol around the same time as this house was being built. The reason I was cutting the grass was that there was to be a visit to this grave the next day by the black New York activist, the Reverend Al Sharpton – I remember it was very quiet, I was alone in the cemetery, in this white, middle class suburb of Bristol, and yet I could already feel all around me the hum, the buzz, the media, the speeches of the next day … and I began to feel overwhelmed by the history.

So, what are obelisks?

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“Obelisk” is a not an Egyptian word… the Egyptian word is “Tekhen” and it’s derived from a verb that means “to pierce”. It pierces the sky, which is the home of the gods… But it’s not all one piece… the sharp bit on the top of obelisks actually started as a separate ornament on the ground…. And that was called a “ben ben” stone, it’s the Egyptian symbol for the beginning of everything, the egg from which everything hatched, the island where life begins. And the shaft of the obelisk lifts this moment of beginning up to the place of ending, to the eternity of the gods in the sky. And I need to lift you up, but in order to do that I need to take you lower down… paradoxical, eh? 8/ (I lead the audience down the sloping path along the south-side of the meadow, to the gate to the former ‘bee garden’.) Now this is where the bee garden used to be - with its bee hives and exotic trees, but they’re not there now, so I’m going to ignore that today, and I’m going to ignore that grand old Cedar of Lebanon over there – which the Parminter cousins would have known from the Epic of Gilgamesh was the sacred tree from the gardens of the Summerian gods. Instead, it’s these I’m interested in - helicopters seeds from the sycamore tree, here… can you make them fall like helicopter rotors?

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(Give the seeds to people to try out – throwing them up so they slowly spiral to the ground.) They haven’t dried out enough yet to work really well…. I knew I was going to talk about helicopters, because when Kristin was showing me the mole-scarer over there, I told her how I’d discovered that the tunnels that moles make underground and the combat manoeuvres of military helicopters when engaging fixed wing aircraft are almost identical, but I said that I wouldn’t mention that to you because it’s completely irrelevant to today – and as I said that a huge military helicopter flew over us. Now, I’d like you to imagine that you’re in that military helicopter hovering over A la Ronde, or maybe that you’re an Egyptian god or maybe a conventional map-maker. (I take out photocopies of a series of maps of A la Ronde, 1838, 1888, 1905 and 1995) So this is the map for 1838. Can you see the orchards there? They’d have made a big impression on the visitor… you can also see a couple of the ornaments… here and here …possibly urns… And in 1888, there’s the kitchen garden, and there are pumps marked… one of which may have been the obelisk-shaped one mentioned in Mary’s will… Or here in 1905, there’s an obelisk here… but also a benchmark here – which marks a sea level - and that must have been on something… And here’s the wild walk… that you walked on the gravel… 18

And here, 1995, see how the orchards and kitchen garden have gone, sold off for house-building. This is the erosion that I told you about. After Reichel had died the house went back to the female Parminter line, but the women struggled to meet the costs of the property and in order to save the house they sold off some of the outer parts for building. And what this meant was that the exotic outer layer of ornaments, the kitchen garden, the obelisks - they disappeared. But I don’t think it’s that which is missing here – I think it is more a feeling than a monument. And to find that we need a more psychological approach. So I need to loosen you up a bit with some alcohol, come and have a drink.

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(I lead the audience down the path until we find Rakeen and Checky, standing beside a small barrel marked “Lisboa”, they are pouring out small cups of Portuguese wine (and grape juice for non-drinkers), which they proceed to hand out to the audience.) 9/ Help yourselves to a little of our Portuguese wine (or nonalcoholic grape juice) – I can’t guarantee that’s it the same grape as John Parminter would have traded in - but before you drink anything I want to make a toast. (Everyone to be given wine/grape juice.) So, I would like a make a toast to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and my toast comes in the form of a description of one of his concepts: (I read from the book of poetic quotations.) “For Lacan, the Real is what is expelled when a symbol becomes attached to some morsel of reality; it is the bit that the symbol fails to capture... for everything that comes into our field of recognition by means of a symbol, something of it must remain imperceptible, unsymbolised: this is the Real. “It is the featureless clay… “…(it) persists in all that cannot be pinned down by a symbol... However you mess about, it is

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always in the same place, you bring it with you, stuck to the sole of your shoe…” Ladies and gentlemen, Jacques Lacan’s ‘the Real’. (The audience drink to ‘the Real’.) Well, after wine comes the ruin. So, let’s go to our ruin.

10/ (I lead the audience around the corner to where a large stone gatepost has fallen over.) I’m afraid, this is the best I could do for a ruin… it’s a rather pathetic ruin. Now, many gardens designed at the same time as A la Ronde would have had fake ruins specially built for them…that didn’t happen here, but there was the same sensibility… and that sensibility is in the symbols on the outer part of the grounds, rather than in an actual ruin. And this sensibility is called the sublime… a sensibility defined in Edmund Burke’s ‘On The Sublime and Beautiful’ of 1756 and in three articles published by another writer in the same year, but I’ll come to them… the sublime is an appreciation of the absolutely great, an enjoyable sense of the overwhelming scale of things, a taking pleasure in the daunting magnitude of nature and history… And that, I think, is the meaning of the ornaments that were once around the edge of this estate, on the introductory path… 21

obelisks from Egypt, the urn from Rome, the cedar of the Summerians … symbols of great civilisations that have come and gone, overwhelmed by the wave of time … as transient as the plants in (gesturing) Epicurus’ kitchen garden… And this sublime sensibility carries on inside the house where Jane and Mary Parminter, hung prints that they’d brought back from Italy by the famous engraver Piranesi of the ruined monuments of Rome… (Show examples from a book of Piranesi prints.) And in the library, alongside these prints, are books owned by the Parminters: Gibbons’ ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, and ‘Don Quixote’, that comic epic of the loss of a, largely imaginary, chivalric Spain… Books, prints, monuments that give pleasure while daunting us by the sheer scale of cosmic history, a kind of ‘memento mori’ reminding us that our beginning and end are closer together than we would like to think…. Now in order to properly show you how the sublime works at A la Ronde, I have to take you back up to the house, but on the way there – forget about the overwhelming sublime – there’s something else in this garden – I want you to enjoy the beauty … of the bright yellow of the Common Bird’s-foot Trefoil – very good for the butterflies here… and you’ll see a rusty haze on the meadow, and part of that is from the seed pods of the Yellow Rattle… the flowers are mostly gone, not all… but the seed pods remain and they’re giving it that brownish, reddish glow… and this is beauty in the philosophical sense, for while these are natural, living things they are here because people have managed

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this place so they can be here – they are a human production of beauty as well as a natural one… 11/

(I lead the audience along the path, past the large oak, and then turn up the path through the meadow, towards the house, up the steps up the centre of the ‘haha’ and turn right and along the path along the top of the ‘haha’ to the base of the viewing platform. As the audience are walking along the top of the ‘haha’ they see, across the upper meadow, Rakeen and Checky around the obelisk creating the image of a white bird, a dove, one using large wings and the other smaller tail feathers. They move in a slow dance movement.) In the 1995 survey of these gardens this lump here was described as an “earthen hill”, but when I was here with Kristin she immediately identified it as a “Regency viewing platform”, the best seat in the house. So, let’s go up…

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(We all climb up onto the viewing platform.) Now we can see the role of the ‘haha’ – protecting the house from encroaching animals, while permitting an unbroken view: allowing the garden to connect to the world of raw nature beyond its bounds… But this is not the view that the Parminters would have had _ I need you to use your imagination to change your view to theirs… So, first: you would be able to see that outer ring of symbolic ornaments on the edge of the garden. Second: the great oak there would not have had that other tree behind it, so it would more clearly focus your eye – just like the view from the door of Point In View chapel - on Langstone Rock and the sea beyond and the chaotic mixing of the waters where the river meets the sea. But third, and perhaps most importantly, these tall trees in what is called the “Shelter Belt” would not be here, instead there’d be shorter orchard trees and this would open up the whole view so that you could see the river and the hills, making this like a framed picture, like a landscape painting, with the symbols of transience in the foreground and the sublime power of nature and relentless history in the distance, mediated by the beauty of the framing. Balancing the beauty of the house and the gardens with the sublime of nature. Now, this was not accidental – this was a particular philosophical design – for this is a picturesque garden – based on a theory of mediating beauty and the sublime.

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Let me read you the theory of these two feelings: (I take out the book of quotations and read, as if from the book, a quotation from Immanuel Kant.) “Finer feeling… is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snowcovered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm… arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks… also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, a feeling of the beautiful. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in hedges are beautiful.” That was written by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and he wrote it in 1756 and what inspired these ideas? The earthquake and tsunami at Lisbon in 1755. That trauma suffered by the Parminter family, along with many others, becomes philosophy through Kant and then is folded back here into these gardens as a theory of landscape gardening. Now, I need to make a confession: – you see, so far, this hasn’t really been a performance - all that Rakeen, Checky and I have

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been doing, really, is to prepare you – because it’s you that are going to make the Real performance… Now, don’t start panicking - it doesn’t involve any acting, there’s no audience other than you. This is how it works: In a moment I will take you down by the house and give you a few last words of briefing – then I’ll take you inside the house to visit for a few moments a very special room in the house, then I’ll lead you out of the house – and at that point I will say goodbye to you... and then I would like you, in silence, to walk Oswald Reichel’s ‘wild walk’ across the gravel, as you did before you met me, but this time remembering the experience of being closed in by the bushes and trees on the outer walk… and then when you come down the path, by the ash tree where you first met me, and the rockery, then walk out onto the grass – to the lawn over here – and take in this view again, and try to see it as the Parminters saw it … and see if the tensions in the house, and the wild walk, of the beauty and the sublime, can find a resolution in this picturesque view. OK, let’s do the last briefing – can you come down here…

12/ (I lead the audience down the slope of the viewing platform, and we gather by the wall of the house. I take out the plastic container of materials and place them on the lid of the container: seaweed, sand, feathers, lime, sea shells, glass.) I have to tell you that I have found it very difficult making this performance.

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In the past I have always used a paranoid approach, I’ve started off by assuming that there is some great secret that’s being hidden and that if I look hard enough I’ll find it. And sure enough, I have turned up some quite excessive things. But this time I’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked. Because the thing I’m looking for was never here to be turned up. So, I’ve used a different approach. I’ve done what I usually do in performance – throwing together a bit of autobiography, some apparently unrelated poems, something about helicopters, different things that I set in motion and hope that when they’re all working together they make a kind of sense – but this time I’ve used this approach in my preparing for the performance… I’ve been playing with the Parminters’ materials, that they used to make the beautiful ornamentations inside the house, trying to find out why they used these materials – trashed, broken materials, discarded or ordinary…. Seaweed, sand, sea shells… clearly there’s something to do with the sea here… and then it struck me that all of these were things that were washed up by the tsunami into the streets of Lisbon… in fact all these broken materials are like the ruins of the city… Glass and mirrors… it’s something about these people… an experience of theirs… Glass… the shattered glass factory in Lisbon... Lime … can you see the remnants of the lime that the Parminters used to encase this whole house? (I point out the remnants of the lime on the wall of the house.) So, lime in building and again the 27

sand… the lime and sand used to make the concrete in the factory that recuperated the Parminter family… Into destruction, they mixed resurrection… Because I think what is the missing, unsymbolized presence, here inside this property, is the earthquake and tsunami of 1755, and although there is no reference here to Lisbon, or to those events, when I take you into the house I will take you into the central room, and there you will be beneath the wave of the tsunami..

O, and feathers? Well, hanging in the middle of that underwater room, is a feathered messenger, with an olive twig in its beak, bringing to

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you the same message as it brought to Noah on the Flood – that there is a new land waiting… a new city to be built…. So, let’s go – first under the wave of the tsunami, then along the sublime of the wild walk, where you can’t be sure what is around the next corner, and then finally out to the Parminters’ picturesque view…

13/ (I lead the audience up to the front door of the house, then through the entrance hall and into the central octagonal room with its green seaweed wallpaper and its blue silk and its shell gallery high above, and the suspended dove with the twig in its mouth. We stay in the room for about twenty seconds and then I lead the audience back out through the entrance hall. I stand just outside the front door, gesturing a ‘goodbye’ to each audience member in turn and then leave them.)

14/ (The audience walk the ‘wild walk’, past the ash tree and the rockery and out onto the haha to take in the Parminters’ picturesque view.)

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