In one’s own garden one has, in the end, only oneself to satisfy. I have had to remember that I have been making other people’s gardens and that the garden must be theirs. People’s wishes and hopes and requirements are contributory factors just like a clay soil, an oak wood, or lack of water. Where I have worked well the garden will be content to be itself and bear no obvious label.

To go a stage further; where does style start? Style for the garden designer means to assemble all the physical elements of a garden scene, to blend them into a coherent whole and to imbue this whole with all the intensity or, perhaps I should say “intelligence” that he can muster, so that the whole may have a quality peculiar to itself. Such style must be contemporary since, if a composition has style, it must reflect its maker’s intention and its maker is necessarily of his own day, even though he may have chosen to give his garden an idiom derived from another place or another century. Here I would like to differentiate between real style and the eclectic use of a style borrowed from another period or another place. This will be a reflected mannerism deliberately imposed: a kind of design, a way of planting, selection of material, which belongs to that period or a place.

[…]

The tensions of modern life and an entire change in our ideas of scale and of speed have made physical tranquillity a luxury. Repose has become a rarity; we may well begin to accumulate and arrange the attributes of rest like stamps or sculpture. The idea of rest seems to be found increasingly in a no man’s land between house and garden. More and more the idea “garden” invades the house, or the house roof spreads out to include the garden.

— Russell Page, The Education of A Gardener

From the two-dimensions of a roughly sketched pencil-on-paper plan to the three- and four-dimensions of plants growing over time, gardening—perhaps too easily—parallels the practice of design (more in a wrote-an-entrance-exam-to-get-into-an-expensive-education-of sense than the scheme-of-things-that-could-be sense). Yet, I am pleasantly surprised to find such fundamental application-level (fun words, put together, those) wisdom so early into the book. Then again, these are—perhaps—not answers, but—in the spirit of the book—seeds for the answers to sprout forth in time. The parallelism has gone too far. (Risky, pointless click. Don’t.) Then again, “Narcotics, like gardening, is a dirty business.” Not sorry. Non sequiturs.

If—on the off-chance—you were hungry for more unfuunny-slash-forced connections, the quote quoted is gardened; one more sentence at either end and it starts to dull like an overgrown patch of grass in an unkempt zen garden.

This above reminds me of the opening chapter from Way back to Nature where Fukuoka discusses the idea of conducting a symphony as a parallel to farming and keeps it aside.