Lily Jencks on landscaping Frank Gehry's Hong Kong cancer centre
Architect behind gardens at Tuen Mun's Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre - named after her mother - tells Charmaine Chan about following in her family's footsteps and finding a repository for grief in nature
In August 23, a big bang over Dumfries mystified residents of that quiet corner of southern Scotland. Was it thunder? An earthquake? An alien invasion?
It was none of the above, according to The Daily Record, although, the newspaper reported, the source was intergalactic: it was the sound of fireworks set off late that Saturday night at Portrack House's Garden of Cosmic Speculation, to celebrate the wedding of Lily Jencks to businessman Roger Keeling.
Jencks chuckles over the newspaper report, saying: "It is very, very quiet and rural around there." The 34-year-old daughter of architectural theorist Charles Jencks and the late Maggie Keswick Jencks also laughs, although with reservation, on hearing that photographs on the internet reveal her nuptial piece de resistance: wide-legged, lace-trimmed Palazzo trousers.
"It's a nightmare finding yourself online, but I had the idea of being married in a jumpsuit quite a long time ago," says Jencks, about the Phillipa Lepley creation she showed off to 300 guests. "It was quite traditional in a way, with the veil and everything. People thought it was a normal wedding dress but when I walked, you could see that I could do kung fu in it."
On a sunny Sunday winter's morning, Jencks is dressed more decorously, in a black-and-white jacket over a sheath dress. Having arrived last night from London, where she lives, she is at the Frank Gehry-designed Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre, in the grounds of Tuen Mun Hospital, to talk about the Chinese garden-inspired landscape she conceived to enhance the building, which opened in 2013.
An architect and landscape designer, Jencks is forging her own career while promoting the charity founded by her mother - also a designer with a passion for gardens. She is at ease in public, chatting with fellow enthusiasts wanting to know about the trees at the leafy site (95 of 130 on the plot were preserved); collection of Tai Hu limestone rocks (used in traditional scholars' gardens); and ponds ("We would love to have fish in them, but for that we'd need a big donation," she says). Like her surprising wedding outfit, the garden delights with tricks of the eye, borrowed from techniques found in Chinese gardens that make the most of a space.