The American composer Michael Gandolfi makes no bones about it. He’s a terrible gardener. “No skill at all with gardens and plants. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’m living, I barely have enough room to plant a petunia.” It’s no use looking for green fingers on the conductor Robert Spano, either. “Gardening skills? Nil. If I tended a garden the plants would all die.”

Despite this, both will be in Glasgow next week expressing their musical talents in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a 70-minute orchestral spectacular inspired by the garden in the Scottish Borders created over 15 years by the American designer and architectural critic Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick. In the 16 sections of Gandolfi’s work you can visit in sound many of Jencks’s extraordinary garden features, inspired by new science and cosmogony. You’ll find the Universe Cascade, a waterfall tumbling through history; the Nonsense, a lookout structure of exuberant verticals; and the becalming Snail Mound, 6m (20ft) high.

For Gandolfi everything started in the spring of 2003. “I read a review of Charles Jencks’s book The Garden of Cosmic Speculation when I was searching for inspiration for a new piece to be performed by Robert Spano and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra. Had his garden been a pure garden, without any scientific concepts embedded, I doubt I would have gravitated towards it. But I’ve always been interested in science and physics.”

Independently, a similar thought struck the British composer Stephen Goff: his 25-minute chamber piece with an identical title had its premiere in 2005 at the Guildford International Festival of Music.

Jencks had no prior warning from either composer. “They were pure gifts. It’s very nice that the garden has inspired this music.” And why shouldn’t it? Like landscape design and architecture, music unfolds in time and space. All three arts use rhythm, proportion and harmony.

Jencks himself is no stranger to music. His father, Gardiner Platt, was a pianist and Modernist composer, a friend of Elliott Carter. And while Jencks says that he gave up the cello at the age of 5, he has long been attracted to musical metaphors. “Rhythms and wave forms were a very powerful influence in the garden’s design. All architects design to music. When he signed his designs, Frank Lloyd Wright even used to specify the composer he’d been listening to. Often Bach.”

Gandolfi, a New Englander now in his early fifties, took his first steps into horticulture with a four-movement suite inspired by Jencks’s garden, then seen only in the book’s sumptuous photos. Fired by the suite’s reception, he visited the garden in 2005, finally meeting Jencks. “We had a nice time, drank some whisky. He gave me a map, we talked a bit about music, but I was more interested in hearing about the garden’s concepts.”

Sometimes turning the garden into music came easily. “When I saw photos of the Nonsense, I just went over to the piano and played the opening. Energetic, spiky, quirky. That was a visceral response.” Staring at the Snail Mound, unusual chords in Britten’s Dowland variations Lachrimae rose up. Other sections were created after a struggle (The Quark Walk) or dextrous labour, like The Universe Cascade – filled with 28 quotations rising through music’s history from Gregorian chant to Steve Reich.

Jencks is yet to hear the expanded creation, but he has heard the 2004 suite. “In a vague sort of way I did feel a connection between the music and the garden features. I followed the score, and thought, now where are we? I was trying to map it where I could.”

The May 3 premiere in Glasgow, with Spano conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (tickets are free), is followed on May 4 by the garden’s one public open day this year (Portrack House, north of Dumfries). Gandolfi plans to go back. And he wants to visit at different seasons to add new sections to the work just as Jencks is refining and adding to the garden. “I didn’t realise how much maintenance was required to keep the garden in tiptop shape,” he says. Had he ever grown a petunia, he might have known.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is performed at City Halls, Glasgow, on May 3 (0141-353 8000). Portrack House is open on May 4 (gardensofscotland.org)

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Gordon Brown’s secret to stayin’ alive
• What’s up with Woody?
• Can Cannes get serious?