Wynyard Hall garden design by Alistair Baldwin landscape architect

Alistair Baldwin, a landscape architect who used to teach at Leeds Met, has designed a garden for Sir John Hall at Wynyard Hall Hotel in the Tees Valley. The press viewed it as a ‘stunning £1.6m rose garden’. Alistair explained the design as ‘a rose garden for the 21st century, in which this most quintessentially English flower is intermingled with swathes of flowering plants from around the world. The layout takes inspiration from the historic evolution of the walled garden, from the strict geometric order of Persian grids, through the raised beds of the English kitchen garden, to the babbling rills of the Moorish gardens of paradise.’ Also:’The grid pattern of the eastern end of the garden is reminiscent of the rigid geometry of the traditional kitchen garden, while the babbling rills echo the calm of Moorish oases. Cedar wood pillars lend immediate height and create the effect of a cloistered walk.’ Baldwin’s account is of double-coding, in Charles Jencks’ sense. So I classify the layout as mainstream postmodern garden design’.