Tom Stuart-Smith
Tom's Best in Show accolade at the Chelsea flower show 2008 is still fresh in our memories, but what other masterpieces has he created, and what is he most proud of?
I started after I left school, borrowing my parents car and driving trailer loads of bricks around London making small back gardens for friends. That was in 1980. My first masterpiece was concreted over by an appreciative client.
Tom's garden at Chelsea 2008 The first large private garden I made was Broughton Grange in the Oxfordshire countryside in 2000. It’s still one of the best things I have done and seems to be bearing up after eight years, although by the standards of most gardens this is no time at all.
Trentham in Staffordshire is extraordinary, not so much because of my contribution but because of the scale of what has been achieved in a place that was a dump only five years ago. It's truly spectacular to see 20 acres of perennial planting.
My parents let me mess about in the garden at home and do all sorts of dreadful things. I spent all my pocket money on plants. Without that freedom to experiment I wouldn’t have caught the bug.
I was also very lucky to meet both Lanning Roper and Geoffrey Jellicoe when I was thinking about doing a second training in landscape design. By then they were both in their seventies and still enthralled by their work. I came away from meeting them thinking that if you can be fired up as that by your work after 50 years it must be pretty good.
We have a country garden of a couple of acres near a motorway junction. The setting is beautiful but there are always interesting things going on like police sirens in the distance, or people dumping rubbish in the lane. This used to bug me. Now I try to think that the proximity of chaos makes the beautiful bits more beautiful by comparison. Sometimes this takes an effort. The garden has a strong structure of hedges and trees and planting that is quite rampant at times. It's not what I would do for other people but it works for us - my wife Sue, three children, two delinquent dogs and me.
I don't think any exotic plants are indispensable. The plants I would really miss are those that are most familiar and part of our landscape such as oak, beech, bluebell, primrose, cowslip. But that’s rather a smug and virtuous answer. The alternative answer would be Echinacea purpurea , Cornus kousa , Hakonechloa macra , Molinia caerulea , Buxus sempervirens . A slightly random selection but as good as any I can think of.
Any that are local or seem to accentuate that quality of a place. So rusty metal might be right by the sea, flint in the Chilterns. Glass on a city rooftop perhaps. Some materials can potentially be used anywhere, such as timber, and York stone almost comes into this category within much of England. I never use plastic.
I think part of the secret of good design is turning problems into opportunities. It's only if one has a prejudice about how a place should be treated that you run into trouble. Levels are one of the biggest challenges the garden designer faces. I make a three dimensional digital model of all gardens I work on and this helps to iron out these problems.
Probably that leyland cypress hedge I planted in my parents garden when I was 17. I was allowed to take it out three years later provided I found a home for all the trees somewhere else in the garden. I spent the next ten years paying secret visits to these deposed thugs armed with a machete and a pot of Roundup. I think there are still about five left - nearly 60 feet tall.
This is impossible to answer, but confining myself to the UK I would say Rousham in Oxfordshire, the masterpiece of William Kent laid out in the 1740s. This isn't (I hope ), because I'm an old fogey and old things are best, but because it is a mysterious, elegiac, and endlessly beguiling place which can teach us moderns a thing or two about how to engage and seduce an audience.
Somebody who wasn't interested in gardening but was interested in the idea of what a garden could mean. Jonathan Miller? A dead person perhaps. Verdi would have been fun.
My work is understatedly modern and often contrasts a very simple architectural framework with a diverse and naturalistic planting style which is rooted in the identity of a place. I try to make gardens in which people feel that they are not being bossed about - told what to look at and where to go. I try to make gardens that can be easily looked after and enjoyed; not showy, ice-cool set pieces where a blade of grass out of place causes a fainting fit.
Get rid of the weeds and think long term. You will always regret a compromise.
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