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FW26: Aeyde Kontinuum Ch.01
"The Garden" by Gemma Janes

Words: Gemma Janes
Date: 25.07.2026
When we think of a garden we think of its plants, the beginning of all life on earth. In the eighteenth century Frederick the Great, heir to what he called a ‘desolate hill’, uprooted an ancient oak woodland to begin an ambitious construction which he entitled Sanssouci, the park of Potsdam. It is a vast, yet contained garden of vineyards, ancient fig trees and topiary with baroque fountains and terraces that demands the attention of sixty or so devoted gardeners each year to maintain. Walking beside me down a cliff edge in Northern Ibiza is cosmologist Joshua Williamson, whose own work concerns an untamable landscape far beyond our reach. Between wild fennel stems and unstable limestone, we discuss what gardening might have in common with cosmology, and why humans are driven to seek order in worlds that continue to grow beyond our control.
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Gemma Janes: Josh, can you introduce me to your research?

Joshua Williamson: Cosmology is a branch of astrophysics which focuses on studying the largest scales we can see, the universe as a whole. We ask questions about our universe, what it's made of, how it began, where it's going. My research focuses on what we can't see. We call it the Dark Universe, mainly made up of dark energy and dark matter, two peculiar things that we don't know much about.

GJ: Do you think there's a relationship between gardening and cosmology? Both seem to be ways of observing change over vast periods of time.

JW: Well, like a garden our universe is growing and evolving all the time. There are galaxies forming all the time. Galaxies that merge together. Black holes form, black holes die, structures in the universe become more dense. The main research topic that I contend with is this mysterious growth we call dark energy and why it is expanding.

GJ: They call it a mysterious growth?

JW: Yes.

GJ: Why mysterious growth?

JW: Because dark energy is this very mysterious thing. We discovered it in the 1990s. Before that, our standard model began with the Big Bang, an explosion where everything in the universe came from an infinitesimal point. It threw everything in the universe out, which is why we thought the universe was expanding. This model showed that the expansion would be slowing, because all that's left in the universe is matter with gravity. It would be natural that the explosion would slow down over time, then eventually collapse back in on itself. However, that's not what we're seeing. We discovered that the universe's expansion isn't slowing down at all. It's accelerating. We've coined this mysterious force that is expanding the universe; dark energy. It's very abstract and very mysterious. A vacuum energy that occupies all of space. We don't know what it is. We don't know what causes it. There's nothing in our standard model of physics that can possibly explain it. We don't know why it's growing. Some of my work attempts to test mechanisms that can go one step deeper and, at least, lessen the abstraction.

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GJ: You’ve told me before that cosmology can, at points, feel so abstract that it verges on feeling closer to a better funded branch of philosophy. What mechanisms are you talking about, how far can our eyes and a telescope extend into our cosmic back garden?

JW: Light is very, very slow in our universe, so the further we look back into the sky, the further we're looking back in time. Our nearest star is about four light years away, so you're looking at something that is four years old. But as you look further and further back into the sky, you're actually looking further and further back in time. Every second there is new light travelling to us from our cosmic neighbourhood. So our observable universe, our cosmic back garden, is always growing. We get to see more and more of it every day.

GJ: So beautiful, we’re looking out, up and back in time. Does it have anything in common with how we can look into a fallen tree and count the rings to assess its age?

JW: Yes, exactly. The way that we can see backwards in time, we can see the evolution of the universe. It has a history. You can see its entire history printed across the sky, from today and all the way back to its birth. The deeper we stare into the sky we count another ring on a tree.

GJ: Do you think gardening is, in some sense, an attempt to create order within a world that naturally wants to tend towards chaos?

JW: It is kind of interesting talking about time and gardens, and it falls neatly into this argument about entropy. One of the ways that you can measure time in the universe is entropy because our universe is going from ‘order’ to ‘disorder’. The universe is a closed system, you cannot introduce anything or take anything away. It’s like one of those terrariums with a cork in the top; leave it long enough and it goes to chaos. Whereas in a garden you can take the cork off the top and take care of it, cut things away and keep the chaos at bay.

GJ: Isn’t science an attempt to find some order in there?

JW: It's about explaining it. The universe is like an ancient woodland, a garden that you can't touch. It doesn't need a gardener. It's like a fantastic infinite forest that can't possibly be tamed or controlled by humans. It has actually been very freeing for me to know that what I research is also a place completely beyond our control.

GJ: And that feeling of wanting to explore something which is so immeasurable, so completely out of reach, creates an energy that drives many of us towards wanting to know more. It is humbling to be at the mercy of the unknown, working on a scale which can seem limitless and honestly quite frightening.

JW: Gardening is sublime. Working with wood and plants and things that grow, it's an unbelievable privilege. As far as we know, there is no other place in the universe that can hold that kind of life. Cosmology could be a metaphor for topiary gardening where you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of gardeners, or scientists, all trying to tend to the same garden. And when there are a lot of gardeners tending to the same garden, there can be a lot of disagreements. For example, we've got this one shrub called the Hubble Constant.

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GJ: Shrub?

JW: Yes, and it asks how fast the universe is expanding. And the scientists can't agree. If you ask one gardener, they think it should be one way; another gardener, it should be the other way. You can try to convince the rest that your way is the best way, bring your evidence to the gardener conference but you'll continue to disagree. It ends up descending into almost different factions of a religion, until you undergo some type of revolution where you get an Einstein gardener who discovers something that convinces all the others that it's the right way.

GJ: But in the end, you're always adhering to the same garden and the rules that were set in place from the beginning.

JW: It's true. In some way, the boundaries of the garden are the metaphor for science. We are very hemmed in by rules that have been set up a very, very long time ago.

GJ: And it seems like, despite this very rapid acceleration in terms of science and technology, we’re not necessarily gaining a deeper understanding. I wonder if we think of the theme of this issue, Kontinuum which considers traditions or values that don’t change, observing nature, the seasons and our bodies, we might gain a new perspective.

JW: I suppose there are things that we increasingly give a lot of value to on our planet, diamonds for example, but they’re actually ubiquitous in our universe. Whereas plants and wood, they’re truly the rarest things in existence.

GJ: There is a wonderful philosopher called Emanuele Coccia. He wrote a book called The Life of Plants which considers that we are connected to plants at all moments, they take us in and they breathe us out too. This awe can be found at a minute level when observing plant life, walking through and tending to our garden, witnessing the return of a flower each spring, in the same way that we look up to the stars in our universe. It is all the same energy.

JW: Even if we never reach a place of comprehension, it's not going to stop people from observing. Cosmology might be the most humbling science because you can only watch. It's the one garden you can look at, but you can’t touch. We can try  to understand or look at it from a new angle, but it continues to grow outside of our control. I think that becomes an endless fascination for some, a continuous joy and a place to always return.

Read Next:

FW26: Aeyde Kontinuum
The Prologue

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