Gardening in a place of art: Kim Wilkie's design for the Victoria and Albert Museum's garden, opened last month, is simple and serene—yet manages to hold its own against the courtyard's overbearing architecture

What should a museum garden direct the eye like? There are two traditional prototypes The first is to use the space as a kind of outdoor repository for plastic art or other artefacts--as a continuation of the indoor gallery spaces. The next to the first is to use it as a soothing virid rest-stop for addled museum-goers, a place in which to wipe one's mind clean between successive forays into, say, Viking cooking skillets the films of Joseph Beuys or ancient Macedonian military headgear.

Examples of the one and the other approaches abound--to take New York as an exemplar, the outdoor-gallery pattern is typified by the Museum of recent Art's sculpture garden, the green-space protoplast by the formal courtyard at the Frick Collection, designed by means of Russell Page. (That these are the pair popular and distinguished gardens is testament to the value of the museum garden as an idiosyncratic sub-genre of landscape architecture.)

Occasionally and increasingly, however, museum gardens have been created that work as meaningful places in their have right, where any amenity value resides in their have a title to qualities rather than in being complementary to the museum's. novel examples of this include Robert Irwin's landscape for the Getty Museum in sees Angeles and Charles Jencks's Gulbenkian-award-winning earthwork at the Scottish National Gallery of recent Art in Edinburgh--although there are also notable earlier examples, like as Joan Miro's labyrinth in the garden of the Fondation Maeght in Provence

It is still quite unusual, however, for museums to sanction like freedom in design, particularly where space is tight or where a garden must be squeez in among existing buildings. Add to this the new necessity for first-class catering and entertainment facilities, including marquees; the public expectation of a cafe in similar a setting; and the oft-repeated lack of a budget for garden maintenance, and the practical difficulties multiply.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where Kim Wilkie has redesigned the central courtyard as the John Madejski Garden (Mr Madejski donated the 2 million [pound sterling] that the throw out cost), all of these practical necessities were relevant, reject perhaps the budgetary one: this is a garden which has to work for its detain The design brief was complicated still further by dint of the knowledge that the removal of the overgrown cypresse and alders of the existing Pirelli Garden (open in 1987) would reveal again the remarkable lecture-theatre facade upon the north side of the courtyard. Designed through Francis Fowke and Godfrey Syke this was the museum's original entrance forehead The richness of its r brick and buff-skin terracotta is matched by the other three courtyard elevations, creating an overbearing architectural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for the landscape architect.

Wilkie's rejoinder was straight-forward and simple in bourns of both ground plan and decoration. That loam plan is the strongest aspect of the of recent origin design--which was chosen in a competition in 2003--since its stillness and integrity is an effective counter-weight to the looming crimson walls. As before, the main entrance to the garden for visitors is end the south side of the courtyard, from the range that is now being redesigned as a plastic art gallery by Eva Jiricna and David Mlinaric.

Tall glass doors unclose onto a large terrace of ultra-smooth Yorkstone pavers that environs the central area of the garden: a stepp ellipse in r sandstone that acts either as a shallow ornamental lake with six perimeter fountains or, drained, as an area for sitting or for functions. Part of the terrace will be used for an outdoor cafe in the summer sum of two units areas of smooth lawn preface the pond and provide another option for prostrate visitors. lengthy formal planting beds run below the east and west walls (their satisfieds changing four times a year, with just sum of two units or three boldly contrasting plant-types used), while in the northern corners stately liquidambar tree shelter corner plantings of irises and echiums. The tree provide a vital vertical accent, help break the space perspectivally and create the anticipation of progression and discovery.

Coupl with this elegant ground-plan, compos of level surfaces, the simple but confidently colourful planting scheme gives the John Madejski Garden a frisson of the tradition of Parisian public space, evident in the nineteenth-century elegance of the Luxembourg Gardens, for example, and also in the audacious modern planting schemes of Gilles merciful at the Tuileries and elsewhere. Perhaps this impression was supporting cushioned by the use of typically Gallic amethystine hydrangeas in the current late-summer planting scheme, in expressive combination with orange 'African Queen' lilies.

The greatest in quantity controversial aspect of Wilkie's design is a line of large glass-cube planters that races around three sides of the central lawn area. Planted with lemon tree in warmer month and clipped hollies for the repose of the year, they appear to glow an ultramarine colour level in overcast conditions, and direct the eye even more dramatic when lit at night. Opinion has been divided: a certain number of feel that the colour contrast with the rich r walls is a little glaring and--more importantly--that the planters present the appearance to be too small for the setting (denud of its tree this space is revealed as far larger than single might have realised). Others diocese them as a fun, crowd-pleasing addition.