The Pines Garden St. Margaret’s Bay

In the meantime, I have been to St. Margaret’s Bay and have done further research. This left me with a lot of thoughts and material which I find hard to make sense of at the moment. Hence, I will just try to give a brief account of these three days and hopefully this will make things clearer.

Day one: It took about four hours to get from Bristol to Dover and this despite delay (Great Western not so great again!). I should add that I don’t drive and normally rely on public transport. But this was not really feasible as I was limited in time and the buses in the Dover area are somewhat intermittent. Hence I was it was grate that Christine helped me out with transport. She collected me at the station and took me straight to a second possible venue for the exhibition. I can’t give any information on this at the moment as I was told not to reveal anything at this early stage.

Then she took me straight to my first meeting at the Old Chapel in St. Margaret’s at Cliffe. Here I met with Brian Davenport who with a friend has set up a new initiative for mentally handicapped people. As far as I understand, the idea behind it seems to be that the focus is on what handicapped can do and not on what they can’t. So is, for example, the community café run with their help. The students also use a space in Pines Garden for a small gardening project and there are plans that they will be running the café at Pines Garden from next summer. I suppose the interesting thing about Brian is that he doesn’t come from St. Margaret’s but within a short time has become actively involved in the community. He also clearly recognises Pines Garden as an asset for the area and for their project.

After that, Christine drove me to Pines Garden where she had arranged for me to stay at the gardener’s cottage. The activity level at the cottage was quite different from last summer, as apart from James Bellamy most of the gardeners and garden volunteers had left for the winter. James had done major building work on the Pines Calyx and is, that is only fair to say, one of the few at Pines Garden who is fully committed to the concept sustainability. To give just one example, while I was there, he was organising his move back to New Zealand going mostly over land instead of the normal long haul flight. Anyway, talking to him was a good starting point as he is so knowledgeable on sustainability and also has a good insight into the dynamics at Pines Garden. In the evening, Christine invited me to meet Lesley Beckett, an installation artist based in the Dover area who will be participating in the exhibition project.

This posting is a brief recapture of my first visit with Pines Garden which took place last May:

When I first arrived, I was immediately struck by its layout. Pines Garden is more or less surrounded by privately owned houses and most of them seem to have a view onto the garden. This particular structure comes obviously out of its history being bought in the 70s to stop further building development in the area. At the same time, when walking around I noticed that you can overlook the garden from almost any point and you can clearly notice its borders. I had the opportunity to talk to the founder’s grandson Alistair about the history of the garden and how the garden has been received by the community. It appears that the closer people live to the garden the least they appreciate it, to the extend that most of the direct neighbours seem to find it hard to see its benefits. According to Alistair, some seem even to think it is a tax avoiding scheme or feel that it is like one person’s gigantic private garden. This seems somewhat at odds as Pines Garden has always been there for the benefit of the village and its activities not only concern the garden but also the community itself. For instance, the gardens are run on the principle of sustainability and the trust is currently working with the community on the possibility of making St. Margaret’s Bay a sustainable village. When reflecting on this discrepancy between views, one thought struck me that is that Pines Garden is not a village green. By this I mean that even though the garden is meant for the community, it feels and looks very much like a private garden, enclosed and with definite borders.

Even though the funding situation is still somewhat unclear, the Olympics have proven to have an effect here as well, I decided to take up the invitation and do some further research.  I will be in St. Margaret’s Bay next week and am curious what I will find out.