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The tenacious history and cultivation of horticulture in the United Kingdom imply that contemporary garden - makers have a diversity of directions to travel along . The well - know country house garden with their traditional extravagant indulgence are still an inspirational violence , apparent in theplayful work of the Bannermans . The popularizing effect of a television makeover show allowed Diarmuid Gavin to utilise advanced design for cushion value and challenge entrenched perceptions of what the average backyard can be . Highly idiosyncratic , visionary individuals such as Charles Jencks are always in the cutting edge , making gardens that lead by personal object lesson . And most of late , the fusion of artistic production , nature and carving seen at international garden festivals such as Chaumont in France and Metis in Canada has brought conceptualism to outside space and paved the way for avant - garde designers like Tony Heywood .
Rill and embed at Broughton Grange — the rhythm of plants reduplicate is a element of New Wave planting , but color is key to the English style . Photo by : Andrew Lawson .
If any interior decorator epitomizes the commonwealth ofBritish garden designat the minute , it is Tom Stuart - Smith . After a quiet start as a designer make on historical conservation task in England through the 1980s and 1990s , Stuart - Smith burst to prominence after 1998 with a string of six gold - ribbon - bring home the bacon garden in just nine class at the Chelsea Flower Show , which really put him on the map as a designer . His diplomatic manner also made him the immediate alternative for Britain ’s most aristocratic patrons‐including the queen herself , who in 2002 commission Stuart - Smith to design a newfangled garden next to the entrance crusade at Windsor Castle .
An early garden at the Chelsea Flower Show demonstrated Tom Stuart - Smith ’s ability to combine minimal art with the English taste for realistic planting . Photo by : John Glover .
His work is a expert barometer of style because it unify the English “ tapestry ” tradition of intense herbaceous - delimitation design , in the tradition of Gertrude Jekyll and the Arts and Crafts movement , with the influx of young naturalistic and ecological planting ideas from Holland and Germany — the so - call New Wave planting movement — with its swaying drifts of grasses and tall perennials arrayed in realistic mode , particularly telling in recent summertime and other autumn .
What this means in praxis , as meet at Broughton Grange for example , is that Stuart - Smith ’s edge designs incline to be draw up of drift plantings of hefty plant life , which are repeat through the garden and organized with all the fear and elan one would expect of the British custom . The whole is lent a clear anatomical structure that is form by just a few specie of Gunter Grass — typically miscanthus , stipa or carex . The primary difference between the British interpretation of New Wave planting and the continental one is in the continued British stress on color , in bicycle-built-for-two with social organisation , and a liking for as wide a scope of industrial plant as possible . A skin - down industrial plant pallette is emphatically not the British way , and this is echoed in Stuart - Smith ’s work , which unite horticultural complexness with social organization .
Chelsea 2006 was another gold - medal twelvemonth for Stuart - Smith , who was acclaim for this virtuoso play on contrast materials : Cor - ten steel , stonework , box and plushy planting . Photo by : Andrew Lawson .
This meeting of horticultural custom could be seen to the most marked grade yet in Stuart - Smith ’s garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in London last year ( shown left ) , where a intercellular substance of grasses offset selection flower such as barbate iris , salvias , genus Verbascum , knautia , allium , euphorbia and genus Stachys .
After the unbridled exuberance of 1990s boundary line design , Stuart - Smith ’s control and sense of scale in planting has been influential . Moments of gauze-like flair are also his forte . In the Chelsea garden shown leave , for example , the tonal relationship between the spare brown stems of the “ average ” leatherleaf genus Viburnum ( Viburnum rhytidophyllum)—which Stuart - Smith line up develop in unusual standard form in a German baby’s room — and a wall of rusted Cor - ten brand beyond — suggests a confidence born of Tom ’s years as a landscape designer working on a large graduated table .
For more information on the workplace of Tom Stuart - Smith seewww.tomstuartsmith.co.uk .
