I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

Cant you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?