In addition to email sent to me from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I get regular emails from NASA with the latest round of Hubble photos. The pictures are always extraordinary, and the language used to describe their content is fascinating.

Somewhere in that huge cache of left-brained scientists there’s a poet or two, and always a phrase that catches my mind and lingers, wandering between the hemispheres. This is the one that captivated me a few months ago: “Special relativity overthrows Newtonian notions of absolute space and time by stating that distance and time depend on the observer, and that time and space are perceived differently, depending on the observer.”

So what on Earth would make someone think of garden design when reading about theoretical physics? Look at the idea again, from the observer’s standpoint: where I am viewing, and when I am viewing, dictate what I am viewing. Most designs have the where and the what, but lack the when. Ignoring the element of time deprives the observer of the complete view that designing for the fourth dimension provides.

So what kind of time are we talking about? Time of day, of course, and time of year, because these control both the amount and the quality of available light. It is also time in terms of age. As I wander through Deering Oaks Park here in Portland, the view in 2007 is dramatically different than I would have seen a century ago. A century from now, it will be different still. The trees will change, the skyline will change, and the ethos of the people will change. What changes ethos? Culture. What changes culture? Time.

Does the fact that I grew up in a culture where women voted, and went out to work and burned bras and marched in protest affect the way I see the landscape? Of course. I am a product of my time, and a product of my age. How I view what I see is a result of both. There’s a perfect example of this at the far edge of the same park, in the form of a very Victorian, very elaborate rose garden. I don’t know how I would perceive this space if it weren’t disconnected from the Park by a thoroughfare, and I don’t know how I might have perceived this space had I viewed it when it was young or I was younger, but I see it now as an island of physical and cognitive dissonance. The site hasn’t changed, but because I have, because the traffic, the city, and the culture has, this particular garden is out of sync with time itself.