4. The Garden Visited page 2

Response vs Reply

The design of the garden is deliberately constrained so that it can only ever act as a `receiver' for these messages (rather like a telephone answering machine, which allows you to hear a message but not - directly - reply to it without using a phone). Within the bounds of the garden, there is no possibility of either speaking directly to the creator of a message, nor of creating another Living Book as a `reply'.

This asynchronism - this one-way nature of delivering messages - is part of the design of the Living Garden. This scheme does not exist to replace human experience and contact. The Living Garden aims to ensure that social `channels' of communication remain at the very centre of human experience, affording them an importance through ritual and place - ritual as the process of creating a Living Book, handing over a Key, the visit to a garden; place - not a `sacred' grove, but a landscape put aside to serve the needs of individuals, rather than the mass demands of amorphous `people', `populations' or `markets'.

Signals & messages

So the Living Garden simply provides a mechanism to deliver messages which can establish a relationship between individuals - it is the contents of any message which determine what happens next. A message may be the catalyst for two people to make contact and meet outside of the garden at some future point; alternatively, it might provide a means and a place in which individuals can convey experiences and events which are never touched upon again outside of the garden (a `secret garden'?); over the years, a Key may even be passed down through generations of a family to provide the means to unlock a voice from the past.

Some visitors may only choose to visit a garden once. Others may visit the garden once in possession of a Key, but return at later points in their life without it, simply to recall the place and time that they once heard a message. Someone else may choose to journey to many of the other gardens in which messages can be replayed. Over time, their recollections of each garden - the colours, the time of year, the sense of place, would fold into and combine with their memory and experience of listening to a message. For one person, these successive `readings' might make the contents, the meaning, of a message grow and flower, whilst for another it would provide the opportunity to let a memory fade and die away.