A garden is more obviously a living structure because its various parts – trees, flower beds, animals – are all alive.
Less visible is the continuous process of unfolding that is taking place, fruit dropping from trees and rotting, being swept away or eaten by birds and insects, a path meandering through the space for people to walk, admire, contemplate or work.
The form of the garden, and its living structure, come from that progressive unfolding – the position of one plant continuing and unfolding from the earlier growth of another. This living structure in a garden is very different from the kind of structure created by 20th century landscape design or landscape architecture. It is a kind of wildness which exists in semi-cultivated form, backed by material, helped by structures that entice natural life into existence. It is a state of the world in which what happens is always, and continually, in contact with what is.
SOURCE: The Nature of Order, Book Three, A vision of a Living World page 233.
Alexander goes on to talk about Doing one true thing at a time to intensify life
While gardens can contain wildness, and reflect it back to us, it is important to remember that Gardens are man-made structures, not nature
AND YET Alexander makes the point that gardens have the ability to generate the qualities of life, SEE Creating life vs preserving nature
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