A map of the garden

Text A: an original contemporary practice extract.

Each month, the gardeners spread a large plan of the site across the potting-shed table. People add a coloured mark where they have noticed a change: the first buds on the pear tree, a patch that stayed damp, or the bench that catches the evening light. When the plan is folded away, the marks remain. At the next meeting, they help us remember what the garden looked like before the latest work began.

I used to think of the plan as a way to locate beds and paths. Now I see that it can hold several kinds of attention at once. One person records a plant; another notices where people stop. None of these marks explains the whole garden, but together they reveal which details have mattered to different people over time.

The map should stay in the shed, where anyone working in the garden can add to it. We should keep the month beside each set of marks, so a change is not mistaken for a permanent feature. It is not a blueprint for what the garden must become. It is a record that lets us begin a discussion with more than our own memory.

Text B: an original contemporary practice extract.

The garden map looked authoritative when it was pinned up at the entrance: paths drawn in firm lines, shaded patches filled neatly, and clusters of coloured marks gathered near the central beds. I wondered whether a visitor would read those clusters as the most important parts of the garden, even though they only showed where people had chosen to add a mark.

A map can make scattered observations visible, but it also gives them boundaries. The quiet corner beyond the tool store has very few marks. That may mean little has been noticed there, or simply that people have not recorded it. The paper cannot tell us which explanation is right.

I would keep the map, but display it with its date and a short note about how the marks were collected. It should prompt questions, not settle them. A tidy picture may help people start talking about the garden; it should not be mistaken for a complete account of what happens there.

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the shared garden map. In your answer, compare what each writer thinks the map can show, what limitations each identifies, and how each believes the map should be used. Support your comparisons with detailed references to both texts.