Charles Jencks’ garden of cosmic speculation translates science into shared experience
Claire Brodka | Designboom | 23rd March 2026
Jencks, a landscape architect, said that a garden should offer “a narrative”. His Garden of Cosmic Speculation, located in Scotland and designed with his wife Maggie Keswick, certainly does that. Spread across 17 hectares, its mounds, paths and lakes are metaphors for “spirals, fractals, and the principles of cosmology”. A reviewer admits that, three decades after its inception, its features are still “almost impossible to explain or describe”. Says one writer “one of Europe’s most important landscaped gardens”.