John Rattray

Since 2005, a Chinese man called Zheng Guogu has been creating a garden inspired by the strategy game Age of Empires. The project is ongoing, so the garden is expanding. It currently covers 20,000 square metres but it may yet become larger, spreading over more of Yangjiang, where Guogu lives. It’s not clear how he came by all this space. Nor is it immediately obvious how a garden can be inspired by a game in which you go to war with others. Perhaps he’s particularly fond of invasive species. This is all quite intriguing and unusual, and most visitors to Garden Futures: Designing with Nature will have questions. Who is this guy? How does he handle his borders? Is his preference for perennials or annuals? Does he watch Gardener’s World? Where does empire-building come in?

Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to George Dance the Younger and at 18 had moved on to Henry Holland. Later came major commissions, a professorship, a knighthood and gold medals. Fame followed. Along the way he added an ‘e’ to his surname and married Eliza Smith, an heiress whose fortune helped him to buy three houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as well as the collection that still fills one of them, which he left to posterity as a museum when he died in 1837. Soane’s son compared the image of his father in a library to ‘a eunuch in a seraglo’ Success attracts critics, though, and one of the keenest was Soane’s estranged son George.