20th October 2014

Weather: Sunny & mild, hurricane forecasted to come in this evening.
Team: Formal

I had the most interesting day & where I learnt the most so far since being here. I worked with Enrico to mark out his parterre design for the walled garden. What looked like complex shapes were actually all made up of orthogonals, straight lines and circles. Enrico had first drawn his design by hand. It was influenced by his child's toys so the shapes abstractly depicts animals like a giraffe, tortoise etc. Then he transferred his drawing onto AutoCAD (Computer Aided Design), he entered the measurements of the fixed points that he knew (the area) and for the gaps of the gravel between the turf shapes he played around with different widths, and then by eye decided that a width of 30cm throughout looked the best, so then CAD would calculate the rest of the measurements he needed for the desired shapes.

STEP 1
As the beds weren't straight we first created our own straight lines to work from. In principal for brick paths, bricks tend to curve and concave inwards overtime in the middle. The corners are most likely to the point where it stays most straight, so we felt it would be safe to create a straight line from that and take the measurements from it, around two bricks width out (20cm). We used a set square to confirm if the line was straight or not, then we took all our measurements off this line.

Photo 1: Enrico using the set square to ensure each point measured was straight.

STEP 2 When we had measure out the points and shapes, we would mark it out with many iron rods.

Photo 2 - Shapes measured marked out with iron rods.

We worked out curves by treating them like circles, we would find the radius and would mark out as much of the curved line as required from this, this usually met a connecting point. We would tie orange string around rods so that we could visualise the shapes better to help us in our marking out (Photo 3)

Photo 3: Me working out the radius of a circle and marking out lines based on this.

STEP 3: We highlighted all the shapes with orange string after we had marked them out, so we could see where we needed to cut. 

Photo 4

STEP 5: After the shapes were marked out and highlighted by string we used a thick heavyish rope to create a better a guiding and more defined line to follow for cutting out the turf out where required. We just used a basic kitchen knife for the job, although a bigger more serrated one would have been better.

Photo 5 - Enrico cutting the turf between the shapes where gravel will go, using rope as a guide to make a more precise line.

Photo 6 - An illustration of the 'space' between the shapes when the turf is cut out to form the parterre.

In actuality, it was hard to mark out the measurements to perfect accuracy because of the beds being slightly wonky, so it as long as it looked balanced as well to the eye that was ok.