Tom Stuart-Smith is the giant of British landscape design. These days, he is too big for Chelsea (it helped him find his voice, he says, while winning three Best in Show medals). We visit his private garden in Hertfordshire near London to learn his nine top secrets for garden design:
Photography via Tom Stuart-Smith except where noted.
Mood
Above: Creating a mood is the most important thing; not themes, not even plants. If a well-loved plant doesn't fit in with the overall mood: ditch it. To create the mood, search for the language of a place and listen to it. Look at the landscape around and incorporate elements of that into the garden, whether that is through a rusted water tank or an oak tree.
Contrast
Above: Tight hedges and loose hedges; the bare and the lyrical; purple and green, naturalism and modernity. "Modernism is so often connected with minimalism in garden design," Tom Stuart-Smith writes in The Barn Garden, a slim and very readable volume co-authored with his wife Sue. He likes to make garden plans that are so simple as to be "almost mundane," but with an opposite approach to the rich planting.
Texture
Above: Photograph by Kendra Wilson.
Texture and form are always more important than flower and color, an instinct shared by Beth Chatto (though they are both masters of color).
N.B.: See Required Reading: Beth Chatto's 5 Favorite Flowers for a Gravel Garden if you'd like more texture and form over color.
A Graceful Goodbye
Above: Use plants that also look good out of season, which die down well. The flowers might not be as showy but the plant always looks elegant. Euphorbia (in the foreground) is such a plant as its companion here, epimedium, with its hovering heart-shaped leaves and very small flowers in spring.
Grasses
Above: Making up about a quarter of the planting in Tom Stuart-Smith's garden, grasses are repeated throughout for "a bold rhythm and simplicity." They also lend support to herbaceous perennials during the growing season. Grasses have a strong presence in the garden during the winter months, lending an air of the "heroically decrepit."
A Journey
Above: "From hearth to heath" or even, re-enacting life's trajectory, if you will. A large garden should lead you, ideally, from an ornamental foreground toward the infinite. Also in a large garden, vistas are key. Don't hide them with tall hedges. Place a statue in the center of an avenue, and the vista will bounce back at you.
Tall Plants
Above: At 6-foot-5, Tom Stuart-Smith favors tall plants so he can be "in amongst it all." He also knows that using tall plants makes a garden look wider and longer.
Think of your garden space as an old map of a town or city, its mass of low buildings punctuated with spires. Give your tall plants plenty of elbow room; use low-growing, shade tolerant plants around them. Says Tom: "Every star needs its understudy."
Above: Tom Stuart-Smith (and assistant) in the garden.
Age
Above: Value the accumulation of years, This is more precious than an instant makeover. Get the structure right and then slowly fill up the spaces with flowers. Buy a few flowers that propagate easily so that soon you'll have plenty, cheaply.
Breathing Space
Above: A meadow of wildflowers stretches as far as the eye can see, or at least as far as the eye would like to see.
For more Garden Ideas to Steal, see:
- Tom Stuart-Smith's Jurassic Park Garden (in North London)
- 13 New Landscape Ideas to Steal in 2015
- Garden Envy: 10 Dramatic Drainage Ideas to Steal
- 10 Garden Ideas to Steal from Belgium
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