06. tête à tête

A “Tête-à-tête” invitation to fresh ways of looking. Visitors are encouraged to open themselves up to another way of seeing, make the utmost of a new experience, and appreciate flowers via physical immersion.
The design is double-faceted, providing visitors with individual or sensorial and social experiences. Subtle mosses, ferns and pockets of delicate flowers take on the aspect of wooded regions, reproducing their successive growth. In contrast, the centrepiece is a botanical tableau: a mass of flowers, their individual qualities dominating, vying with one another to attract attention.
Visitors are invited to view the garden from below, where the field of vision and vegetable palette evolve and cause the garden to evolve with the passing seasons. This perspective raises the flowers’ status, bringing fresh awareness of their shapes, textures, colours, particularities and existence, and is conducive to meditation. Horizontal and vertical lines run across the flowerbeds. Confronted with plants as high as themselves, visitors are drawn to reflect, recharge their vital energies and rethink the natural order of things.
This new fashion of seeing a garden and the tête-à-tête confrontation it involves enable the powers that flowers possess to revitalise the body, the senses and the mind. This is a sensorial garden where visitors must be in harmony with the moment. Greater awareness of colours, fragrances and the rhythms of sound can only help improve our ways of thinking.

Designer

Anna RHODES, landscape architect
GREAT-BRITAIN

As an artist and Landscape Architect Anna Rhodes’s work explores space activated by people. With an investigative research approach, she demonstrates sensitivity in thought process and design. Alongside her commitment to HarrisonStevens, Anna maintains her own practice as an artist. She has worked for and collaborated with a broad range of Landscape Architects and artists and has professional experience ranging from conceptual masterplanning to small scale installations, community consultation to detailed implementation for several complex and large scale public realm schemes throughout Scotland and internationally. Anna has experience of using community consultation to revitalise high street use through design interventions in several towns across Scotland. This has taught her that engagement leads to a sense of ownership and provides a platform for conversations. Sparking conversations leads to greater things. Anna strives for a balance between engagement with the user and considered, beautiful design.