The Artist’s Garden, situated on the vast half acre public access roof terrace on top of Temple Underground station, celebrates its first anniversary with the unveiling of an expansive new work by horticultural installation artists Heywood & Condie.  Artist-gardeners for over 60 years, Through the Cosmic Allotment expresses the immense unseen power of the world of plants.  A vibrant living installation that draws us beyond our everyday sensual interface with plants, it celebrates our ability to find spiritual and psychic affinity with the non-human world. 

On arrival at the summit of the steps leading from the tube and Temple Place, the viewer is confronted by an acid green lawn and four greenhouses with trees, endless sky and the Thames as this ‘garden’s’ backdrop.  An elevated and intriguing location for an allotment, which the artists consider to be a portal through which the gardener can reconnect with nature.  The greenhouse, ‘the horticultural world’s equivalent of a temple’, is central to any allotment. It is a place to carry out the many rituals of gardening involving nurture and care – watering, pruning, pricking out.  This devotional engagement makes the greenhouse a place where human and plant co-exist; a place where heaven and earth meet.  The ritual of gardening requires a constant shift of attention from the macro – the elemental forces of weather, temperature and light – to the micro – consideration of sub-soil organisms and the balance of microscopic nutrients.  The abstracted sculptural gardens of the four greenhouses create a narrative to synthesise the cosmic/magical and scientific/physical aspects of gardening and our relationship with nature.

However, glass stands between the viewer and the internal gardens.  The glass is both transparent and made semi-opaque by drawings, glyphs, symbols and marks: a ‘jangle of information’ which makes it hard to focus the eye on what is inside or outside.  These floating drawings, of different intensities on each greenhouse, are both a barrier and a portal.  As barrier, they signify our increasing separation and alienation from nature as we are bombarded with distractions: the deluge of scientific data and mapping, distorted images of nature made surreal in their intensity, drama or scale.  As portal, they signify the overlooked and invisible forces of nature communicating ‘beyond the noise’.  Animistic nature is decoded by the artists through the drawings with a view to creating channels of communication between outer and inner worlds through the medium of the garden. 

  Peering beyond the glass into the first greenhouse, a complex assemblage of giant bejewelled sculptures meets the eye.  Versions of single cell microorganisms found in ponds and rivers, they are scaled up to a level of hyper-visibility to create a parody on the insignificant, overlooked and unrecognised and to echo the blaring images of nature on our screens.  The second greenhouse adopts a Zen garden formation containing flourescent neon pink, green and orange simplifications of scholars rocks.  These naturally occuring rock formations, viewed as microcosms of the universe, were brought into the studios and gardens of ancient Chinese philosophers to allow them to meditate on the paradox of the complexity/simplicity of the world.  The vibrant otherworldly glow of neon emanating from the ‘Cosmic Allotment’s’ rocks highglights the lucid experience of deep nature immersion during such meditations. The third greenhouse contains an interpretation of the ancient celestially orientated double stone cirles of the Druids, encompassing erupting rocks perhaps activated by astrological forces, perhaps leaving their traces in the star maps and symbols of their glass sky. 

 Progressively simpler forms are drawn on the exterior of the greenhouses until we arrive at the most minimal of marks: the dot and the wave which hover on the glass of the fourth greenhouse.  These less frenetic and less dense forms float above an inner world that is composed entirely of thousands of sculpted clay forms. These spherical constructions refer to the invisible sub-atomic particles within a quantum field - a speculative space where everything may be considered as reflecting a condition known as pure connectivity or ‘oneness’.  This garden is life at its greatest level of simplification as well as at its most complex level of interconnectivity.  It is where science and spirituality converge in their quest for the smallest most singular truth to be found in nature.