Any visitor to the week long Chelsea Flower Show can see the extent to which gardening remains the most British of hobbies. Which other country would run a televised horticultural event featuring such diverse guests as the Queen, the cream of the City, green-fingered enthusiasts from across the world and JLS, a boy band made famous by a reality show?
And yet while the flower show gives undoubted pleasure to many – it is also a vital showcase for the talents of British garden designers, whose skills remain in demand long after the final herbaceous border has been packed away. “There’s not exactly walk-in business,” says Arabella Lennox-Boyd, a gold medal-winner who has designed gardens for everyone from the pop star Sting to the King and Queen of Belgium. “However, it has a knock-on effect and reassures current clients.”
British gardens and garden designers have become as desirable an international export as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. “The English garden is what everyone wants,” says Lennox-Boyd, who currently has one client in Ukraine and one in Moscow. “They feel it’s buying a dream.”
Andy Sturgeon, who won Best in Show at Chelsea last year, has subsequently attracted increased interest from China and South Korea, where clients are keen on modern design combined with “the clipped formality of hedges”. His other clients live everywhere from Hong Kong to Ibiza to the Middle East, all keen for an English garden from an English designer.
Tom Stuart-Smith, winner of three Best in Shows as well as seven gold medals, estimates that some 25 per cent of his work now comes from abroad. Although a reluctant traveller, eager to spend time with his family and in his own beloved Hertfordshire garden, he’ll always go if the work’s interesting. His most recent commission came from a private client in Kerala, southern India, who saw three plants of his in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair and got in touch via his website.
At the top end, the client base for these designers reads like Who’s Who. Stuart-Smith’s clients have included the late John Paul Getty, the billionaire philanthropist, Stephen Hester, Sir Fred Goodwin’s replacement at RBS, and the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Christopher Bradley-Hole, another leading light, whose public designs include landscaping Arsenal’s former football stadium after it became a housing development, famously caught the eye at Chelsea of Sheikh Zayed, the late ruler of Abu Dhabi.
The top tier of garden designers appears to be almost as rarefied as the clients it serves. “I don’t take on work if I don’t like the look of it,” says Stuart-Smith, the Eton and Cambridge-educated son of a judge.
This world has apparent advantages – not only a natural, well-bred discretion about higher-profile clients, but also the confidence to tell them when they’re being unreasonable. “The key is to be extremely bossy,” says James Alexander-Sinclair,a journalist-cum-garden-designer.. “If a client says he wants a palm plantation on a grouse moor in Scotland, you have to be brave enough to say, ‘Don’t be so ——- stupid’.”
In America, on the other hand, some garden designers have found a reluctance to spend in the current financial climate. “I used to have a lot of American clients,” says George Carter, who made a garden for Lord Heseltine. “Now I have just one. They don’t want to spend their money, or at least they don’t want to be seen to be spending their money.”
All designers are keen to stress that there is no such thing as a typical client. Sometimes it’s a couple who have inherited a house, or have downsized, or who are trying to simplify the work of someone else. Gardens vary from tiny city alleyways to country estates to blank new-builds. Carter is excited by his new project: the challenge of designing a five-acre garden surrounding a 12-bedroom new-build.
What all designers appear to agree on is the attraction of long-term projects (except in London, where it’s more a case of how quickly they can do it and get out of the client’s hair). Mrs Lennox-Boyd has been working on one of her favourite gardens for more than 40 years, returning each year. “The most interesting gardens are those that develop and change,” agrees Stuart-Smith. “I’ve made my own garden over 24 years. There are plants there I’ve bought years ago for 50p. Gardens are not static conceptions. They’re an ongoing conversation over a patch of land.”
The rewards of such a profession are self-evident – and inspire some to very un-British expressions of emotion. “By and large, people who garden invest the better part of themselves,” says Stuart-Smith. “There’s a great deal of emotional energy in a place. They’re trying to make roots in a world flying past at high speed. We’re playing with people’s dreams. So I take it very seriously.”
Alexander-Sinclair has an earthier analysis. “Gardeners, as a rule, are nice people,” he says. “All my best friends are gardeners. They’re down to earth. At the end of the day, they’re just growing a bloody parsnip. And one can certainly live quite happily without a parterre.”
Perhaps. But for those millions of enthusiastic amateurs who’d like to have a jolly good shot at trying, Richardson sums up the appeal best. “People really like gardening because it goes wrong,” he says. “And that appeals to our sense of Britishness.”
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