Value-

It strikes me that lots of the discussions we have are about aesthetic value.  I went to an event called "Building the new Garden city" last night organised by Sheffield Universities department of landscape architecture.  I went because Piet Oudolf  who had designed the planting scheme for New Yorks High-line was speaking.  He was brilliant and inspirational.  I like the highline as it represents people coming together to see something differently - see a potential where there is a problem.

At the end of the talk the session was opened to questions.  The last slide was of a piece of the highline that they had left untouched with the natural self seeded plants growing on it - it looked a bit scruffy but had a certain romantic and historical attraction - perhaps an Aesthetic heightened by the fact that much of the rest of the high-line was manicured and designed as Piet said gardened by gardeners who cared.

Someone in the audience asked if the high-line should be allowed to go back to nature - Piet plants perennials and the planting has a 15 year cycle - he says he designed it to give people an introduction to nature the thing I liked about him was the absolute clarity of his response. He has very good English and his shortened sentences seem to hold more than the word - his reply went something like.

"The high-line is not a return to nature, it is a garden, a design an artifact, a civic space for people of a mega-city to keep connected to the nature which flows in all of us, in shadows and in the sun, in life death and transition people need these spaces to be in, not to stop and eat a sandwich at lunch but to connect through their feet to the planet, the life.  I have made a garden that attracts 5 million visitors a year, as a species in a city we have to be pragmatic- we are not holding onto wilderness or letting things return to a false idea of the natural, we are working with the planet to build futures that may not look like the past."

I think I have done some serious paraphrasing here but I hope it captures the gist.  And I have also approached value from a funny direction but perhaps the first step of any exploration of value is to calibrate or at least be aware of the context of what you are valuing - Piet seemed wise in a way I admired- perhaps before we value we need to seek Wisdom