The Chelsea garden that’s a feast for the ears
Ivan Hewett meets the A-list gardener and the 17-year-old composer who are taking next week’s Flower Show in a new direction
Music and gardening – two arts that give innocent pleasure, but in every other respect seem poles apart. One hurries into being at a certain moment, measures time out in strict beats and, when it’s over, leaves no trace. The other moves at the slow pace of a leaf ’s growth or the wheeling of the seasons, and is as solid and earthy as music is evanescent. A garden can provide a setting for music – and often did, in the Pleasure Gardens of the 18th century. But the idea that a garden might be musical, or that music could fit the contours of a garden, seems a non-starter.
Not so, as it turns out. A brand-new garden created for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show proves the two art forms really can fuse into one. This year’s Morgan Stanley Garden may well be the first garden in history to have its own specially created musical soundtrack. Lauren Marshall, the 17-year-old principal composer of the National Youth Orchestra, has written a new piece to be listened to on headphones by visitors to the garden as they walk through it – and which will be played live by a group of NYO players at the opening of the garden on May 23.
Music in a garden seems charming idea, but for Chris Beardshaw, the garden’s designer, there’s greater reason for doing it than that. “I’ve always thought that music and horticulture were close,” he says. “Think of the language we use to talk about the business of creating a garden. We talk about orchestrating colours, or the rhythm of a row of trees, or the texture of a flower bed. A garden is dramatic in its essence.”
Before you mock, remember that Beardshaw is a man who knows whereof he speaks. He’s been a mainstay of Gardeners’ World on the BBC for years, has won numerous gold medals for his garden designs, and has been obsessed with plants since he was four years old, when his grandmother gave him some seeds to grow on blotting paper. In 2007, he won the ultimate accolade for a gardener, of having a rose named after him.
Why did the commission go to young Lauren Marshall, you might ask, rather than some titled older composer with a string of awards to their name? The reason, as Beardshaw explains, is that this garden has a special raisond’être. “This garden is all about the idea of education, which is one of three principles of Morgan Stanley’s community outreach programme,” he says. “When I had the idea of a musical accompaniment to the garden, it seemed right to involve youth in some way. I got in touch with the National Youth Orchestra, and they put me in touch with Lauren.”
Music and gardening have another, deeper connection, which Beardshaw is eager to explain. “It’s all about pattern,” he says excitedly. “The great thing about nature is it doesn’t obey classical geometry… look at the way leaves form on a branch, or the way branches whirl around a trunk. It can seem random, but actually there’s a very strong order to these patterns, which are rooted in fractal geometry.”
I ask what this means in layman’s terms. “It’s when a pattern is the same on the large scale as the small. You have a shape which keeps burgeoning and changing, but if you look at it closely you find the same basic shape repeated over and over. And this got me thinking about music.”
But hang on – isn’t music supposed to be about feelings? In fact, Beardshaw is no dry rationalist. “For me, music is a way of articulating the emotional journey of this garden, which is like a journey or walk in three parts,” he says, pulling out a soil-stained sheet of paper with the design. It shows a rectangular space divided roughly into three parts, and bisected diagonally by a swirling curve that throws off smaller versions of itself, very like those fractal curves you can find on Youtube.
On the left-hand side is a large greenish area, with a path that leads to what looks like a pavilion in the middle of the rectangle. “That’s a wooden loggia, which forms the centrepiece of the walk,” Beardshaw explains. “That green area is woodland, which I think of as calm and meditative – it envelops you slowly. There’s just the odd highlight, a patch of blue flowers here, or a shaft of sunlight over there.”
Did he have music in mind when he designed this part? “Yes, I imagined the slow movement from Bach’s 3rd keyboard concerto which, to me, has a similarly immersive quality. Then if you follow the path it leads you out, past the second part, which is the loggia, to the third part. This is the antithesis of the first, it’s open and sunny and very formal. The flowers aren’t modest in this area, they’re brazen and highly coloured. Here I imagined the Adagio from Mozart’s piano sonata No33, which has a similar formal, ceremonial quality.”
What was needed, Beardshaw realised, was a new piece of music that would articulate the entire journey. Which is where Lauren came into the picture. For such a young composer, she has sophisticated tastes, ranging from electronica and free improvisation to Debussy and Sibelius. Her orchestral piece Suspended Between Earth and Air, which I heard last winter, showed a precocious ability to create a haunting soundscape, in just a few deft strokes. And there’s certainly a beautifully pastoral quality to her Chelsea piece, Linger in Light, which tints the air with slowly shifting chords, flecked by points of sound like dewdrops, and grows more animated towards its close.
She admits that composing a piece to accompany a garden walk involved a steep learning curve. “It was difficult to get started, because I really knew nothing about gardens, and it was fascinating to learn from Chris how gardeners think. Call me foolish, but I hadn’t realised how similar the thought processes of creating a garden and creating a piece of music actually are. He showed me the garden at Hidcote [the National Trust garden in Gloucestershire, which Beardshaw describes as the most influential of the 20th century] and explained how a garden is actually a sort of journey. Before that I’d always imagined a garden as a static thing.”
Did this change the way she thought about the piece? “Yes, my first thought was to have three different ensembles, a string group, a wind group and mixed group of harp and percussion and clarinet, playing radically different music at once. But once I understood Chris’s point, I brought the groups together and rethought the piece in a linear way, to lead the listener from one mood to another.”
Did she know about the two pieces Beardshaw had in mind for the two ends of the garden? “No, and I’m glad I didn’t, because that meant there was no temptation to imitate them. Some people might say it’s cynical, trying to mould people’s feelings, but I don’t see anything wrong with that, and it’s allowed the piece to become almost a part of the garden.”
The young composer ponders the nature of her art just as much as Beardshaw himself, and feels that the affinities between music and gardening are profound. “What Chris does is so organic, and I’d like to have the same quality in my music. I collaborate with musicians the same way Chris collaborates with nature. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but you could think of a piece in the same way as clouds or leaves, the same shapes coming round differently in each performance. It’s been such an education, to see how many affinities there are between what we do.”
The Morgan Stanley Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show can be seen from May 23 to 28; rhs.org.uk
‘For me, music is a way of articulating the emotional journey of this garden’
‘Some might say it’s cynical, trying to mould people’s feelings, but I don’t see anything wrong with that’