Previous chapters have described how - by visiting a garden with a Key - almost anyone would be able to receive a message through the Living Garden, and the way in which - by making use of the range of widely available authoring tools or services - individuals can create their own messages. The example used, so far, in order to illustrate the mechanical stages involved in these processes has been that of a spoken love poem. But what of other types of message?

Reunion

The Living Garden is not intended to be a prescriptive environment in terms of the contents of Living Books, but it clearly serves some purposes better than others. Neither is the Garden meant to compete with systems like the telephone which caters for more immediate communication needs - it would be perverse indeed to create a Living Book, to despatch a Key with instructions to visit a garden, for a message saying that you `might be home an hour late, tonight'. Similarly, its purpose is more than to put a television set, HiFi or cinema screen in the countryside - not least because all of these functions are performed far better elsewhere. Extending the philosophy behind the Garden to the outside world for a moment, one could say that the appropriate `Viewer' for a movie is a cinema screen, whose `garden' is a cinema.

Returning to the Garden, again, its social purpose does, however, have something in common with letter writing. Living Books are generally likely to be the result of various reflections (although some authoring tools would allow something to be `scribbled down' - captured by microphone or lens - in a hurry if required). The role served by messages delivered through the Garden could range over anything from the psychological, to the pathological, the touching to the hateful, the sublime to the ridiculous. Whilst some messages might almost serve ends in their own right, for many the reason to create a Living Book would be to maintain or catalyse events outside of a garden. A Living Book is not intended to be any kind of substitute for experience. One person might find the process of listening to a Living Book solitary and intellectual, something which they restrict to within the literal walls of a garden (as a place). For someone else, a garden would simply be the starting point from which a Living Book would serve as the catalyst for a lifetime of events all of which take place beyond the limits of the Garden (as a scheme).