Sunday Herald

When his wife died of cancer, leading architect Charles Jencks set out to keep her memory alive through the Maggie's Centres. There he has designed special gardens, but they are not just places to sit and rest – they reflect his attempts to grapple with the big questions of life and death. This is the story of a garden, and an intellectual journey, and a death (but don't be put off: it has a hopeful ending). It's a love story too, and … well, really you could say it's about life, the universe and everything. Technically, what you're looking at is a mound, but it's more like a squeezed ziggurat, or a slowed-down helter-skelter: a grassy hillock threaded by a white gravel path. From below it seems modest, little more than a hump, but once you set foot on the gravel, the spiralling journey to the top seems to go on forever, as if you're climbing a mountain.