One way to catch and pin down the spirit of a place, indeed of a garden - assuming that it is a good garden, and that it has a spirit - is to ask yourself who might live there, which characters, what plays, which novels might be set there? Interrogateyour impression of the place, but start with a relatively easy question: could you stage A Midsummer Night's Dream here? Would Puck be at home? Or, if you set the first act of Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession here, would it approximate sufficiently to 'acottage garden on the eastern slope of a hill a little south of Haslemere in Surrey'? (Why didn't he actually give a map reference and be done with it?) Or would something more sylvan - 'a wood, dark and mysterious; in the background the faint glimmer ofa lake' - be more fitting, as prescribed in the stage directions for Rutland Boughton's opera The Immortal Hour?
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