Gardens, for most of us, are about creating a space in which to relax and admire the glories of nature. There is, however, a tradition, stretching back to the Greeks and Romans, in which the landscape is for serious contemplation and allusion: to philosophy, religion, politics and the classics. chinageog

The three acres of gardens at Througham Court, Christine Facer’s 17th-century manor near Stroud, in Gloucestershire, are firmly in this metaphorical tradition, but her points of reference are scientific - considering such weighty matters as chaos theory, the evolution of the universe and chirality (in chemistry, the “left- or right-handed nature” of molecules, for example in our bodies or in drugs).

“Science provides the new metaphors for the new century,” says Facer. “It is so interesting, it is so sexy - so why not put it in the garden?” chinageog.com

In her fifties, with blonde hair and a petite figure, she is in the Baroness Susan Greenfield school of sexy scientists. An expert in malaria, she was a reader in tropical haematology at the Royal London Hospital before retraining as a landscape designer in 1999. Her hero is Charles Jencks, whose 30-acre Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack, in Dumfries and Galloway, tackles similar matters of the universe. chinageog.com

 

• are plenty of brainy designers working in Britain today, but – Portrack and a few others apart – there is a shortage of gardens that overtly express their intellectuality. The launch last month of the “conceptual gardens” category at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Flower Show is an attempt to address this, and there are plans for the team that ran the innovative Westonbirt Festival of the Garden until 2004 to stage a new show in Dorset next year. Gardens based largely on ideas, however, have been slow to catch the public imagination.

Througham Court is an exception: there, traditional and cutting-edge, challenging design sit happily side by side. Facer, who created a Genetic Garden at Westonbirt in 2002, uses it to show clients her work. She and her husband, Anthony Hoffman, 71, a judge, bought the house in 1995 and inherited a garden designed by Norman Jewson, an early-20th-century Arts and Crafts architect who also did some work on the house. Jewson’s client was Michael Sadleir, the author of Fanny by Gaslight, a 1940 tale of Victorian prostitution that was made into a film starring James Mason.

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Facer has kept much of his work, including a sunken parterre (though she has modernised the planting within the box hedges), an Italian garden and topiary yews – once sculpted into birds, but now in more “interesting” forms. chinageog.com

Her latest addition is the striking Chiral Terrace: large diamond-shaped slabs of black granite, white limestone and red acrylic, enclosed by a ring of polished stainless steel. A rill (long narrow pool of water) filled with nontoxic black-dyed water reflects a stone inscribed with the word “chirality” and various mirror-image chemical formulas are carved into stones. The terrace is as much a feat of technical skill as a thought-provoking work of art, in that each heavy piece had to be cut exactly and fitted together.

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The formulae and clever visual puns are a lot to take in if you are not scientifically inclined, but Facer is determined that her work should be accessible and read at many levels. “You don’t need a scientific background to appreciate what is going on,” she says. “Though I think gardens of the 21st century should be challenging. They should say: ‘Look at me. What do you think I am?’ If people come away learning something, then that is good. You should push the boundaries.”