Peter Zumthor's Secret Garden

 

Peter Zumthor today showed off the concept art for his go at the Serpentine Gallery pavillion. Apart from the fact that it seems to turn people viewing it into ghosts, it looks like an exciting prospect. A pretty one too. It's set to be one of the busiest pavillion shows for years according to the Guardian, and this isn't a surprise. Popular art is pretty art.

Zumthor's design though, is particuarly interesting to me today as I've spent my entire weekend gardening. On Friday morning I stood over a horrible, oozing patch off mud, full of thorns, slimy bluebell stalks and cat shit, quaking with fear at the amount of sweat, blood and tears about to be shed. On Sunday afternoon my Mum and I proudly surveyed a neat patch of turf and loamy beds packed with plumpening plants. Several pots of herbs line a neatly brushed path, and everything will soon turn pink, purple and blue. If things do what they're told, sweet peas will crawl six feet up an old fence, and the rose bushes will recover from last year's hacking.

I really only cleared the garden out because I wanted somewhere to have a barbeque and sit with my breakfast on sunny mornings. I was unashamedly the sort of gardener mentioned by Kipling in this otherwise rubbish poem:

...Gardens are not made
By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade

Then I actually did some real, proper gardening. Luckily I escaped Kipling's fate of it causing some sort of nationalistic Christian rapture. Instead I began to feel a bit Zen. There was something profoundly and literally grounding about turning over earth and then planting stuff in it. About being scratched to bits by rose bushes and apologising to worms for digging them up. And then rolling out the turf and flattening it by rolling and stamping all over it, and finding yourself covered in mud and grass and sweat. I haven't got the time, eloquence or energy to describe how it made me feel, but the emotion was somewhere between these two things: 

The best place to seek God is in a garden.  You can dig for him there. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In gardens, beauty is a by-product.  The main business is sex and death. ~ Sam Llewelyn

Anyway. Zumthor said this about his garden pavillion:

The idea underpinning the design is that of a garden of quiet pleasure and ruminative calm set just a couple of minutes from the 24-hour motorised roar of Kensington Gore. "The concept", says Zumthor, "is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time."

And what I've been trying to say, in a very roundabout way, is that this is a bit bollocks. There's nothing oxymoronic or even surprising about ruminative calm being a couple of minutes from motorcars and the rush hour. Plants in themselves radiate calm. It's nature. The next time you are out in any busy area, look for the plants surging up from under the concrete. They're impossible to stop. It's fantastic. It's beautiful. No-one needs an entire pavillion to point this out.

I'll still be going though.