It is a rarely admitted truth that all gardens are unnatural. I am tired of an industry that pretends otherwise. I am not advocating to abandon naturalism. But I want to become explicit about the reality that gardens cannot happen without someone interfering, deliberately and repeatedly, with the ordinary course of things. I want to make and write about gardens in a way where desire is admitted, where plants are treated as collaborators rather than materials, and where horticultural knowledge makes possible encounters that might otherwise never occur. I am suspicious of the idea that our highest ambition should be to make landscapes appear as though we were never there. I want gardens that reveal what becomes possible when we are very much there - paying attention, making selections, taking risks, falling in love with things we do not fully understand. Gardens that are strange not because they disregard ecology, but because someone has learned enough about the living world to ask it increasingly improbable questions. You can delve into my thinking further here: