Gardening In Water Garden

Having visited the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show over the decades, I have noticed that now, after a period of lack of interest, there is a revival of enthusiasm for water gardens. This may be a result of climate change and ever hotter summers, or the development of the technology that makes waterfalls, modernistic fountains and other watery effects easy to achieve. The best garden in the show of woo (a very good year for show gardens), 'Evolution' by Piet Oudolf and Arne Maynard, featured an arching jet of water that leapt from one pool to another (overleaf); anyone wandering in would have been drenched, but clearly this did not deter the judges.

I shall be looking at how famous designers have used water features in the past, from Bernardo Buontalenti, architect and designer to the Medicis, to 'Capability' Brown, a major mover in the landscape gardens of England, along with the more recent contributions of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ian Hamilton Finlay. I shall be looking, too, at how designers, often confined to small urban spaces, have nonetheless found it possibleto include just one small fountain or a single still pool. The influence of the traditional water gardens of the Far East and of Islamic cultures from India to Spain is huge, especially on designers who are working in town gardens or in arid areas, as the heavy reliance on stone, bamboo, infinity pools, silent rills and trickling troughs shows. Included here, too, are those gardens linked to a large expanse of water that cannot be disregarded: gardens beside lakes and rivers, gardens perched on cliffs and by maritime inlets, and island gardens, where water is literally omnipresent.

Of course, water today is a political subject: if global warming continues we are likely to have too little in certain areas and too much in others. Water will probably become a resource that we have to use with care rather than with abandon. But the very fact that it will be important and valuable will increase its worth in our eyes.