Tom Stuart-Smith on Landscapes, Legacy & The Uplifting Power of Nature

0:02I started living in this place when I was 26, which had no trees on it. It was an open field, it was 50 acres of wheat. Everything in that environment, you know, wheat planted. It's almost like having two parallel families, a sort of vegetal family and a human family growing up at the same time. There's quite a lot going on and sometimes it seems like too much. And then suddenly, you know, I'll spend two hours in the garden and everything sort of falls calmly into place again. and these things which seem insuperable difficulties, three hours before suddenly are pushed back into perspective. There's quite a lot of sort of nostalgia in that and maybe sort of self-reflexiveness that you're walking through this thing that you created.

0:43And then you have this uncanny feeling that it is having almost more of an influence on you than you ever had on it.

0:53Tom Stuart-Smith:Hello there and welcome to a new episode of Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith. Tom's designed gardens at places like Chatsworth, Tate Britain and the Hepworth in Wakefield. He's won no less than nine gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show and was awarded an OBE in 2023. But long before any of that, he grew up here on the Surge Hill Estate in Hertfordshire, which was originally bought by his grandfather. Tom spent his childhood climbing its trees and staging Shakespeare plays in the garden and apart from a brief spell away he's lived just 200 yards from his childhood home for almost his entire life.

1:35Tom Stuart-Smith:Tom's wife Sue is a psychotherapist and author of the book The Well-Guardened Mind. Their shared ideas about the uplifting power of nature have come together to form the Surge Hill project, which is a part of the estate where community groups like schools, young offenders and people recovering from illness can come and get hands-on with the garden. At its heart is the Apple House, a beautiful modern pavilion designed by their son Ben, which is where we recorded this podcast. Tom gave me a tour of the building and the surrounding garden, which is available as always on Patreon. This is a conversation about what it means to be profoundly connected to a place.

2:16Tom Stuart-Smith:Tom has spent the majority of his life on the same plot of land, digging and planting, and somehow reshaping himself in the process. You create a landscape, he says, and it creates you. Here it is, and I hope you enjoy listening. Hi Tom. Let's start at the beginning. So where did you grow up? Did you grow up on this? Yeah, well, I grew up 200 yards over there. How amazing. So, yeah, I suppose I'm a very rare and very privileged beast in that I've moved really 200 yards in all my life. And I've never lived away from here, you know, other than when I was a student for more than a couple of years.

3:00I lived in London for a very short period when Sue and I first got married. But we came back to live here when we were 26. So we're 27 maybe. so really young you know and we started um so I've lived here I'm 65 now so whatever that

3:18Tom Stuart-Smith:maths leads you to yeah but a long time most of your life yeah and that that's incredibly rare particularly in suburbia right I mean okay that's a bit disingenuous we're not really in suburbia here but we kind of are in a way you know we're 19 miles from the centre of London but thanks to Green Belt legislation you know we're in we're in open country but we do have hundreds of thousands of people within 10 miles of us yeah so your grandfather bought this initially is that right yeah my grandfather bought it he he was born in 1864 get a load of that cool and he married my grandmother who was who was local and she I was I was brought up with her She died in 1976.

4:08And my parents came to live here in the 50s when it was, you know, a post-war. It was all struggling a bit. My dad was a great builder. I mean, that wasn't his job. He was a judge. But in the old days, judges used to get very long holidays. And he built the house which we live in. He loved, he loved, you know, he was always, always at something. Very creative man. so he he built he rebuilt this this old medieval barn which which we have as our home and and some sort of pigsties and stuff um and some outbuildings which i now have my studio in and this was a this was a this was an orchard which i replanted with him in the i would say the early 80s probably

4:52Tom Stuart-Smith:okay so when you were a child then which which part of the estate were you in i was in there's a there's a big white house over there um uh which is a queen anne house which was then um then adapted in the 18 about 1811 by an architect called busby who was a um did a lot of work in brighton and hove you know that kind of thing and it's a it's a it's a lovely house it has a has a sort of glazed veranda with with cast iron posts and very charming very lovely quality of light and it has a lawn and a ha-ha and a little kind of park. And yeah, it was a pretty heavenly place to grow up. I was one of six children.

5:38My parents were very busy. We were left to get on with ourselves. A bell rang at mealtimes and we came from distant corners of the place and sort of assembled. And there was a market garden, which was a hangover from the war, you know dig for victory and we had to we had to work in the garden every day um for for an hour i think so so yes it was a pretty idyllic childhood very quite quite isolated i would say from the rest of the world you know we just sort of got on and did our own thing what was the downside of that isolation then do you reckon i don't think there was a downside no really i mean you know we spent our time i spent my time in the woods climbing trees i started planting trees and gardening when I was a teenager.

6:23No, there wasn't that. I can't pretend there was any, any remote downside. My parents were, were quite sociable. And, but in a, in a very generous way that from, from teenage years onwards, you know, they, they basically said, you know, the house is here for you and your friends. So when I was at university, you know, I mean, every other weekend, And particularly in the vacation, you know, friends would come and stay. We'd fill the house with friends. It was an amazing, amazing thing. So fortunate.

6:56Tom Stuart-Smith:Yeah, yeah. So six siblings. Five, well, six of you. So where are you in that hierarchy? I'm number four. So sort of just a bit under the radar. You know, the oldest ones always get it tough, don't they? I sort of realise that now. I was able to, you know, there's maybe less pressure on me. um but one thing that you do do when you're when you're a big family is it's sort of serial niche occupation if that doesn't sound too pompous you know somebody the oldest one does this so you look around you say well i'm not gonna do that the next one does that okay well that niche is occupied as well um and and for me the the kind of the kind of tree gardening niche was still just about just about open i think i might have been a bit of a cuckoo in that department but i I mean, I sort of got in there and I kind of, I did kind of make it my own.

7:48And amazingly, you know, I was planting trees and working in the woods by the time I was, I say this amazingly, not because I'm pretending that I'm an amazing person, just that I had this amazing opportunity. And I had somebody yesterday here from Hertford County Council who's helping us with a bit of tree planting. And I was saying, look, you know, those spinneys and woodlands, you know, I planted in 1983 when I did a holiday job at Hertfordshire County Council and managed to wheedle some grant aid at the same time. So I've just been incredibly fortunate to live in this environment where I'm walking around seeing trees that are 50 feet tall that I planted when I was a young man.

8:31And I'm still planting trees today.

8:33Tom Stuart-Smith:That is quite amazing, isn't it? I was interviewed someone recently and we were talking about the idea of belonging to a particular plot of land as if it's kind of your terroir right it's part of you how do you explain that in your context is that do you feel like that? I think for me, it's been one of the most profound things in my life that I lived. I started living in this place when I was 26, which had no trees on it. It was an open field. It was 50 acres of wheat. And so every tree in that environment that you see, everything in that environment, we planted. And so at the same time as we started a family, we started creating this environment.

9:19So my children, who are now in their 30s, have grown up, fortunately, slightly slower than the trees. But that's been an amazing thing to have these two. It's almost like having two parallel families, a sort of vegetal family and a human family growing up at the same time. And as this garden and these woods have grown up, your outlook on the world is changed, literally, because you're no longer blown off your feet. Your views are limited. The way that you see the sun, the way you see the stars even, the way you see the moon, everything is changed by this environment that is gradually shaping itself around you.

10:07And I think that one of the things that is so profoundly different about creating a garden and creating a landscape than it is about a building is obviously that you just set the process going and then it takes a life on your own. So you, okay, I look at that and I think, well, I planted that tree, but I don't feel that I did it. You know, I don't feel that I've, the tree has done it and time has done it. There's a wonderful sense that it's not an egocentric thing in a way. You know, whereas if you make a building to some extent, you know, you did it. It is a bit finite. And that's a wonderful thing for an architect.

10:43But I feel there's something more sort of forgiving in a way about landscape in that it just carries on giving and growing and developing and looking back at you and you look out at it. And it's a very rich thing. That's really lovely.

11:02Tom Stuart-Smith:So getting back to you as a child, what kind of character were you then? If you're number four in the hierarchy, you say you're a bit under the radar. What were you like? Oh, I don't know. I think I was a pain in the arse probably. I think I didn't stop talking. My brothers used to go, burble, burble, burble. And I was nuts about plants. And we had a very active childhood. We had family plays every year. then after then after um i had a godfather who used to write plays for for his family and our family and then from the age of about 18 my dad would put on a shakespeare play every summer um with compulsory attendance from all members of the family it was pretty extreme he would learn his lines every year every year so he he did you know i mean malvolio i don't know how many times and Lear, you know, the whole lot.

11:59He would learn everything and we would not learn our lines and we would be rebellious and stubborn and difficult. But it was a sort of, you know, one of these rituals, which was about binding every summer. We would finish off the summer by having the family Shakespeare play, not really in front of an audience other than the families of those who came or people, neighbours who had a very good sense of humour. But they were amazing fun and some of them were, you know, some of them were pretty good. And he would make the costumes and the scenery. And, yeah, it was memorable, memorable stuff. A bit farcical at times.

12:36Tom Stuart-Smith:And how did you get on at school? Well, I enjoyed my first school and it was such an amazing place that I think my second school was a bit of a disappointment. You know, I went to a conventional public school and I found it a little too containing. and not a liberal enough environment. So I didn't really flourish there so much. But, you know, I got through it. And, you know, like a lot of kids, I mean, the great sort of period of epiphany for me was when I left school aged 18. I mean, I'd never, because we were a big family, we didn't go on sort of luscious foreign holidays very much. We used to pile into some old car and drive up to Liverpool and go to Northern Ireland, you know, which was fantastic.

13:29But I went to Italy for the first time when I was 18. And I mean, it just really, I think it really did change my life. I just was, it was, you know, they call it the Stondahl syndrome, you know, when Victorian ladies faint in front of Raphael portraits. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was almost like that. I came out of the station in Venice and saw a church opposite, which is San Simoni Piccolo. It's not a Palladio church, but I thought it was. And I had a sort of false Stondallian moment of virtually fainting in front of this view. And I think that going to Venice and going to Italy aged 18 was the moment when I thought, hmm, I was going up to university to do natural science zoology.

14:16and in my first week I saw what true scientists looked like and I take my hat off to true scientists but I'm not I'm not systematic in that kind of way I was a dilettante kind of scientist and I realized that pretty quick and so I had a sort of re you know recalibration I had to sort of think about what I was going to do and fortunately you know again another fortunate thing my parents were prepared to support me through doing landscape architecture as a postgraduate.

14:45Tom Stuart-Smith:Yeah, so before you did that, you were at, was it Cambridge? I was at Cambridge. You were at Cambridge and that's where you met Sue, your wife, right? Yes, yes, we didn't go out there then but we became friends very early on. Okay, how did that change then? Well, because I decided to change from being a scientist to being a designer. She decided, she did an English degree at Cambridge and then decided, partly because her father died very young when she was at Cambridge. That sort of, you know, knocked her back a bit and made her think about what she was doing. And she decided to become a doctor.

15:21She'd never done any science before. So she had to go back and do O levels and A levels again. And at that point, her mother was living in the country, I was working my first job out beyond Oxford. And we started seeing a lot of each other then. And so by that time, we'd known each other for sort of seven or eight years. And yeah, so that was wonderful. And so we're very fortunate that we share, you know, because we have a lot of university friends in common. We share an enormous number of friends. In fact, pretty much all our friends are friends in common.

16:01Tom Stuart-Smith:Wow. Other than, you know, people who've come later through medicine, being a doctor or me through design. So that's a rather wonderful thing. And we have now, you know, for a long time, we had different professional lives, very, very different. And we didn't really bring them home. I didn't really bring my gardening friends home. Maybe I didn't have any gardening friends. And she didn't really bring her doctoring friends home either. And then partly through, we had a festival here, the Garden Museum. um first their first festival of of gardening and literature we had here about eight years ago and christopher woodward the wonderful director there said to sue why don't you do a talk on gardening in the mind and she did this she did this remarkable talk which you know lots of people had never thought about gardens in that way before and and christopher came up to her at the end and said, you have to write a book.

17:05And she thought, wow, you know, and she spent quite a bit of time, you know, doing the research for it. And that was a wonderful moment for us because it brought our interests together. And I suppose this project is a kind of culmination of that, you know, having kind of maybe sort of being quite guarded about areas of overlap before. This is a pretty comprehensive area of overlap even though you know i'm still the the one who's doing most of the gardening and most of the kind of maybe the organizing of physical things sure she is doing so much of the of the programming of the looking after people making sure that the you know the community of people are very happy um of thinking about what it you know what it means to be in this space and how we're relating to all the other people who have an interest in it.

18:02Tom Stuart-Smith:So how did you first understand that this thing of landscape architecture, gardens could be a profession and what was that, what was the genesis of that, how did you actually get into it in the first place? Well I was wary of it first because I thought it was about designing gardens for very wealthy people, which, you know, I mean, I do do some of that. But I didn't want that to be it. And I met when I was in my early 20s, before I did the, you know, training, I met Geoffrey Jellicoe. And he was in the middle of designing a cement works in Derbyshire. I thought, oh, that's interesting. And he was also doing the drawings for this garden that never happened, the Moody Garden in Florida.

18:52And that was a pretty inspiring moment. I didn't get to know him very well, but I mean, I met him five or six times, I should think. And the other one was a less well-known, he was an American kind of society gardener called Lanning Roper, but very distinguished gardener. He did a lot of work for the royals and people like that. Just an immensely charming man. So I think I thought that, you know, if these guys, they're in their 70s and 80s, you know, have such enthusiasm for their work. There must be something in this. And it wasn't just about, I think I find the idea of making gardens for individuals at that point quite claustrophobic.

19:29And I did do a couple of private gardens when I first started off professionally. And in fact, when the first gardens I ever did, I built myself and I, you know, borrowed my dad's car and went and bought bricks and laid the bricks and all this stuff in, you know, little gardens in London. And I quite enjoyed that. But I did a couple of gardens for sort of wealthy people, you know, through a couple of connections when I was in my sort of early to mid-twenties. I found that too much. I found people getting, you know, the proximity. I wasn't, I didn't have a thick enough skin to manage that. But it was a good lesson because I realised that if you're taking on the responsibility of making a garden for an individual it is quite a close thing and you have to be quite resilient in that space and you also have to be confident you really have to know you have to know what you're doing you know up to a point because to have the confidence of persuading somebody that you're you know that what you're proposing is right um so I stepped away from that private garden thing for quite a long time um and um had the great opportunity of making my own garden i mean you know because i moved here with sue when i was so young i started making my own garden when i was 20 26 27 and that later became the springboard to having my own you know setting up my own practice which was in 1998 is that right yeah i mean it's quite you know by today's standards people you know they do they do a garden design course set up their own business in their 20s you know have a television program or whatever or podcast a year away yeah I was 38 yeah and I mean my my moment did come through the garden here that that I started making the garden I had a piece about the garden in house and garden and then through this wonderful person called Tanya Compton, who's still, you know, became a good friend.

21:27She introduced me to Chanel, who were looking for somebody sort of suitably pliable to work with Karl Lagerfeld on a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. And I amazingly got that gig. And that was a springboard really to be able to set up my own design practice and start a career which was very much built on on appearances at the Chelsea Flower Show which I did a lot of in the noughties you know from about 1998 through to 2010 I was there sort of pretty much every year or every other year and then I just had a big break from that and and concentrated more on on making these public gardens and larger private gardens and but certainly you know that that that little period of quite a long period of making show gardens was a was a great great experience and a great sort

22:28Tom Stuart-Smith:of testing ground of ideas yeah I want to ask you about Chelsea because um I mean you've had phenomenal success there as well of course is it nine goals you've had at Chelsea something like that yeah I mean it's amazing really so how do you assess the Chelsea Flower Show as you know What's its sort of overall value? Do you see what I mean? What's the impact of it? Well, I mean, it still has a lot of exposure. It gets so much television time. I'm not sure that its international appeal in the design canvas is not quite what it could be. I don't know quite what that is. I feel that's partly because of the space that gardening occupies in Britain, that it is a very we have a very individual take on on gardens it's quite quirky it's sometimes quite kitsch um you know if you went to a garden show in Belgium or or France I mean it would be or Germany it would be very very different it'd be much more design literate I'd have to say okay so we we're very plant orientated which I think is a wonderful thing you know we do know more about plants than just about any other nation on earth when it comes to temperate plants and that's a that's a that's a wonderful thing people do turn to the British for our for our knowledge about plants but sometimes we're we're we we get lost in the lost in the plants and don't look enough at the at the actual design of of of what we're doing that's interesting isn't it because it's very tempting I think as an amateur to go into a garden centre and pluck a few things that look nice and then stick them in your garden yeah and that's presumably not what you would advocate well my I used to give my mother plants and she'd say oh darling I'm going to put it in front of the front door and I think oh no don't do that the front the area in front of the front door became a kind of cereal graveyard of gifts you know um yes and I think I think plant plant centredness is a wonderful thing you know it's so good and actually it as i design more i do put less hard stuff into gardens than i used to i think i used to overbuild things you know too much concrete too much too much hard um and and increasingly realize that people respond to being surrounded by plants in a way that they don't respond to being surrounded by concrete.

25:05And I think increasingly it's wonderful to see that so many architects I work with, really great architects, say, you know, please cover my building in greenery. You know, I do a lot of work with Jamie Fobert, Field & Fowles, Howe Tompkins, you know, really wonderful architects at the forefront of what they're doing. Studio Mumbai and I enjoy working with them because they absolutely want this close interfusing of built form, external space and the planted sort of rich environment and I don't think that there were many architects in that space 25 years ago. It was the kind of Noli, Me Tangeri, kind of Richard Meyer kind of thing.

25:50The architecture as a swallow dive, you know, with all the greenery pushed well behind, which I think is just completely outmoded. I think there are some great architects who still occupy that space, but I think the younger generation in their practices are sort of realising that that is, you know, it is not where we should be, this pearl-on-the-cushion notion of architecture, which I entirely reject. Yeah.

26:16Tom Stuart-Smith:Yeah, I went to the Chelsea Flower Show this year and it really struck me, actually, that every garden had some sort of pavilion involved with it. There was a Studio Weave one, for example. And that fusion, as you talk about, between the architecture and the landscape, I thought was actually the most interesting thing about it. Could you just give us a sense of what the logistics are like of putting together a show garden and it having to be absolutely perfect for one particular week and kind of what goes wrong with that? Because it seems logistically very difficult. It is logistically quite difficult.

26:50I mean, you have to have quite a bit of contingency planning. You have to have a really, really good team. I mean, I'm doing it again. I'm being wheeled out again next year. I'm doing one for Tate because we're making this very exciting garden around Tate, Britain, completely transforming that interface between Milbank and the building. lots of plants lots of porous surfaces lots of you know biomorphic stuff lots of great sculpture and we're going to give a sort of bit of a preview at at at Chelsea and that's quite challenging because because we are we need to use all the plants we use at Chelsea bar a few that will come from here and come back here we'll we'll we'll go on to Tate so that's a big constraint and a lot of the plants we're using at Tate are climate resilient trees.

27:47And the thing about quite a lot of these climate resilient trees, particularly things that are like hot temperatures, they don't come into leaf until quite late in spring. So that is an anxiety for me that some of these trees won't be very leafy and people will be saying, oh, that doesn't look very healthy. But that's what it is. and a lot of these trees come from European nurseries so there are big biosecurity issues there so at the moment we're having to bring all the plants together in a nursery in northern Italy and then we have to have a we have to have a biosecurity inspection from the Royal Horticultural Society there then we have to bring them in we have to get the timing right so they don't sit in a lorry for too long then we have to look after them over here then we have to make sure that we have you know if something gets damaged that we have backups we have to grow you know probably half again the quantity of plants that we would actually use in the garden because some don't make it i'm personally not somebody who's particularly worried about whether something's in flower or not i i like there to be a sort of degree of truthfulness about i don't want to push things too far um but we will grow some things in polytunnels here you know well we have poly sorry I shouldn't over-egg it.

29:04We have an A polytunnel. I'll be putting a few things in there. I like it because it's a great, you know, it's a great team effort. It's a wonderful opportunity for my team to get involved hands-on. It's a fun piece of theatre, but it does take close planning and I have to work with somebody in my team who doesn't leave anything to luck. You know, you can't just say, oh, well, let's hope that works on the day. Have you had any disasters? disasters i've had i've i've had a few near disasters i mean we we did um um we did a garden in 2005 with the telegraph and we used tons and tons of cortern steel i mean again you know something i wouldn't do now the idea of using all this steel and in those days we didn't worry about what happened to it afterwards it would just sit in somebody's yard in fact it's in it's in my

29:57Tom Stuart-Smith:courtyard garden because the telegraph said oh take it away we don't want it yeah they didn't ask me for any money i said sort of can we can we pay you for it and they said no no just take it away anyway but that was a bit dramatic because um it was all in in the contractor's yard and some kids broke in literally the day before it was going to be delivered to site and used these big Corten sheets as BMX ramps, you know, bicycling, and drove bicycles. So they had tyre marks all over them. So we had to sandblast the whole lot down back to the raw steel like 10 days before the show was opening and then rely on rapid rusting.

30:44Tom Stuart-Smith:Can't you wee on it or something? That's what you do with copper, isn't it? You use dilute hydrochloric acid. But then, that's another story. Mark Fane who runs Crocus who's our wonderful contractor went to get some hydrochloric acid from the chemist and then two weeks later has a visit from MI5. Seriously? Special branch. Because it's a sort of essential component of bomb making equipment. That's incredible. These things you don't know. That's so good. I love that. Thank you Tom. So let's talk about this place. So you live in the barn. he said. So just describe that to us. What's that like as a home?