Wadham Park - timeless design for thoroughbred racehorses, awaiting good things

Wadham Park, the new Racehorse breeding and training facility at Tylden is a kind of Ivy League college for young horses. You can just imagine the sleek thoroughbred parents hope their foals will get in. The other day I had the chance to visit.

For a shed, the architecture was quite heavenly. 

The lighting was gentle and natural, something most humans don't have or think to ask for. 

This would calm the horses, so all their energy is used when it should be - on the track.

The materials used are plush, but modest and peaceful in color: bluestone, timber, corregated iron, echoing the shapes of the familar old Victorian houses that populate the Tylden countryside, a walk away from where my many many grandmothers lived out hard lives, with much less glamorous horses to help.

Here is Goldie, she's already had a good mornings training, and its still only time for elevenses. 

Dean Harvey's title is bloodstock manager, making him a cross between a stockbroker and a matchmaker. His job is to hit the jackpot with excellent breeding, excellent training, and perfect heathcare. 

Here he shows the synthetic racetrack, made from a resilient polymer particles. It cushions the horses footfall, drains water off the track, doesn't blow away, and more than earns back its cost of $1 million to lay.

Like the equal and opposite of an organic farmer's situation, you invest in getting a good ground.

No weed, no living thing will take root in this. 

Horse lap-pool, a work-day version of the Taj Mahal rill. Tiles surrounding it are rubbery, with the spring of walking on a forest floor. The shopping streets at my latest home in Tokyo were made of the same material. Walking on it makes me inexplicably content. Its just missing the fragrance of a real, leaf-littered riverside walk.

Only a couple of years ago, this beautiful creature didn't exist.

The gates at Wadham park are grand, befitting the value of the creatures inside.

The entrance garden is looks like it wasn't a priority.  I guess it was planted by the people who plant sturdy shopping center gardens.  Low-maintenance, no-problem gardens. But this garden could be  something to make the heartbeat quicken,  something dashing, enchanting.

I wish it had been mine to design.

Draw over the top of this photo in your mind. 

Add weeping tinkling trees, creating dapples, swishing in breezes. Cover the commercial path with gravel and rustic stepping stones. Fill the undergrowth with treasures and surprises - delicately tinted pansies, rhubarb to give visitors, woodland bulbs, mauve onion flowers. Put in some arresting modern artworks, and hey, horseradish.

Weeping plum in June, Burnley college, photo by Cecilia

We could make this garden a place that draws Wadham's racehorse-owning visitors off the straight and narrow path, into a kind of underwater 3D world of unfamiliar beauties.

There would be fragrant bowers where people would discuss their hopes for their horses, dappled light bathing their world.  The fragrance of the old fashioned quinces, the pippin apples would waft over to the stables, promising the hardworking horses something crunchy and sweet to look forward to.

Cecilia's edible front garden, in 3D

As an organic garden permaculture  garden, pests would be managed by other insects, frogs and birds, and by all springing from lively soil, well composted, fluffy and stable.

The colors would relate to each other with the same delicacy the architect used in the buildings, but more scrumptious.

I swirled my straight couryard bricks. Much better.

For horses who must earn their own keep, Lyn Dixon in England has a useful website of Permaculture ideas for self-sustaining pasture-and-horse combinations. I like her recommendation to add a sprinkling of sheep - she says they eat woody weeds that spoil grassland, soak up parasites, keeping them off the horses, without harm to themselves. Don't drain marshlands, she says. They provide herbs for horses to self-medicate, and parasite-eating bugs.

Technoratty, finding surprises, having a 'win' in the garden

There are so many places in the world waiting for us to come and permaculturizse them. Where do we start, and how to we get ourselves asked?