I’ve recently noticed a gentle increase in the number of well-known and fairly well-known garden designers championing the work of professional gardeners. Podcasts, articles and social media; there’s sense that the value of gardeners is starting to be discussed just a little bit more.
The first time I noticed this, and I suspect the first time it really became a thing, was the 2022 Sky Arts TV series The Art Of The Garden, each episode of which featured the work of a notable British or European garden designer. The episode to feature Tom Stuart-Smith took us to his garden at The Hepworth Wakefield, an art gallery in Wakefield, up in the north of England.
Gardeners are the unseen element of a garden
Katy Merrington is the gardener there. She was recruited by Tom Stuart-Smith and has also been championed by him, becoming a notable figure in her own right. During the Covid pandemic people in Britain were encouraged to leave their homes for exercise, and many in Wakefield were drawn to the garden at the gallery. Katy was still allowed to work and ended up being someone people could meet and speak to who wasn’t part of their immediate family.
I think that was really the catalyst for Katy becoming a Community Gardener. This term is fairly new, at least here in the UK, but appears to mean a gardener who works in a public space and whose role specifically allows them to interact with the public.
Positive Role Models
Gardening needs more role models, and I don’t mean celebrity gardeners.
There are surprisingly few well-known and well-regarded gardeners around these days. We certainly need more, and quite frankly there are so many gardeners out there doing excellent work it’s only fair to give them credit for their achievements.
This doesn’t happen on its own you know…
It’s easy to reel off the names of leading garden designers but much harder to come up with a list of notable modern gardeners.
Status And Hierarchies
Professional horticulture is needlessly hierarchical.
Garden designers and consultants are at the top. Then you’ve got your Head Gardeners, owners of prestigious nurseries, and the top arborists. Below them you have gardeners for prestigious gardens.
Then there’s a big gap before you get to the freelance gardeners and the nursery staff. If popular opinion is to be trusted, and it is not by me, the lowest of all are the mow and blow gardeners who seem to just whizz around a garden with a mower and a leaf blower before shooting off to their next garden.
Public spaces are not treasured enough, and neither are those who care for them
I don’t like this system, and that’s not just because I’m firmly down at the bottom of the pile.
It’s a system that ties income to visibility. Garden designers have far more glamorous careers than gardeners. Who wouldn’t want to design gardens rather than digging around in the dirt?
Could the horticultural hierarchy be dismantled in favour of a different approach?
Think of each element of professional horticulture a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Nurseries make one piece, designers another, arborists and gardeners are other pieces and so on. Each piece has its own value and contributes to the overall picture.
Most gardeners can create something far better than this if they’re allowed to. It would be hard to make something worse
The biggest advantage of the jigsaw model is that it allows people from each piece to be recognised. Rather than accepting that garden design is the most glamorous and therefore the most valuable part of horticulture, my approach would allow people from each sector to be recognised for their own contributions and values.
But at least for now we’re stuck with the hierarchy model.
The Impact Of Social Class
If you’re reasonably clever and want to go into something horticultural you go into garden design. If you’re not particularly bright then you go and work as a gardener.
A horrendous simplification but one I fear a great number of us will recognise. I have the privilege to work alongside many talented and clever gardeners, and over the years I’ve come across garden designers (including some moderately big names) who quite frankly can’t be trusted not to choke on their colouring pencils.
There’s also a very notable, yet little discussed, social class element to it all. This becomes particularly notable when you look at the designers who are responsible for the most prestigious projects. The most iconic designers nearly all come from fairly affluent backgrounds. Why?
Making a garden can be very expensive, so a healthy bank balance is an advantage
Firstly children raised in more affluent homes are far more likely to have a broad range of experiences, such as exposure to the arts, culture and travel, than those from less affluent backgrounds. That I think is a fairly obvious point. Less well appreciated, maybe, is that people from more affluent backgrounds are massively more likely to be connected with other people who are similarly affluent.
Having those social connections allows a certain group of designers to avoid having to do the small projects that others have to do to build their portfolios, and instead allows them to start with more prestigious gardens. That’s quite an advantage, and without doubt it elevates certain designers very quickly.
I’m not saying that these designers aren’t talented, just that their social status allows them a clear advantage over others. The world of garden design is not a level playing field.
Championing Gardeners
I’m a professional gardener. A lot of my friends are professional gardeners too.
I should be excited that prestigious designers are apparently promoting the value of gardeners.
We’re more likely to notice when something is wrong, like this badly mown grass, than when it’s right
The truth is that I’m rather sceptical. I don’t think this is anything beyond casually paying lip-service to the lower echelons of horticulture. I certainly don’t think for a moment that garden designers, generally speaking, will want to share the limelight with gardeners.
They’re not going to risk their income and status by letting gardeners take credit for great works of horticulture. It would be nice for professional horticulture to be a more level playing field so that talented people from across the industry can have a chance to be recognised, but for that to happen would mean some very closed circles of people dedicated to protecting their own vested interests would have to relinquish their dominance.
I can’t see that happening.
Gardens can’t be built to look like this, they must evolve under the care of talented gardeners
The profession of gardening needs to elevate itself, not wait for salvation from elsewhere. Horticultural media is obsessed with designers – and a few Head Gardeners of prestigious gardens – but is unlikely to go looking for new and interesting talented gardeners to champion.
I think the biggest challenge, based on my experiences with my fellow gardeners over the years, is that the best gardeners don’t seek attention. Gardening is a very personal thing; talented gardeners are usually so focused on their work that they don’t see the appeal of self-promotion.
They’ll happily take compliments on behalf of their gardens but become visibly uneasy taking compliments for themselves.
Maybe great gardeners are just meant to be invisible though? What if the focus should always be on the garden, and that we should be elevating gardens rather than focusing on people? Garden design culture has succeeded in tapping into the idea of celebrity culture. People don’t just flock to a Piet Oudolf garden to see which plants he’s used; people flock to see a Piet Oudolf garden because it is a Piet Oudolf garden.
This has to be your favourite garden ever: it was designed by Piet Oudolf
I have no answers for how we elevate the craft of gardening and celebrate those who devote their careers to it, beyond saying that attempts must be genuine and respectful. What I can say is that success will more likely come from ground level and not from above. We can all play a part in this by simply championing the gardens we enjoy.
It’s easy to dismiss gardens that are ‘wrong’ in some way; how often do we make a conscious effort to champion gardens that we actually like, let alone the invisible faces who tend them?
As regards the last photo: I admit I haven’t been able to get heleniums to grow like that yet…..
Heleniums love a humus-rich but free-draining soil, but they also relish reasonable amounts of water during their growing season. Usually where people go wrong is to either let them get waterlogged in winter or too dry in summer.
Thank you Ben, I appreciate your response. I must admit that since embarking on a perennials ‘journey’ in the last few years, it is the daisy-like plants that have given me most difficulty. Perhaps this is due to climate (Australia) even though I am in a temperate southern area and was thorough with soil preparation.
I’ve wondered about Delos at Sissinghurst. It seems to me that Troy Scott-Smith and his team have been the prime makers of that garden. Even visiting actual Delos for necessary knowledge. Who gets the credit? Dan Pearson. This seems fairly typical of the process to me.
But where do you place garden makers who have done the lot: design, graft and maintenance of a major garden?
Go Anne-superhero/lunatic, It takes one to know one. Ann
It’s definitely typical of the process.
Garden makers are an interesting group; I would say that garden makers are the centre of a three way Venn diagram, overlapping with gardeners, designers and probably landscapers.
Anne, like you and Charles, they are the reality backbone of admirable and unique garden creations. For instance, Ellen Willcott and Eloise Butler, two of my favorite dedicated, cantankerous gardeners. Their legends continue to this day. Eloise with no money solicited the community for funds, Ellen spent her entire fortune on her garden obsession.
My typo correction: it’s Ellen Willmott (1858-1934)
I like what you’ve said.
Thank you.
Interesting as ever. I would certainly cite Troy Scott Smith and Fergus Garret as professional gardens who have most definitely sought the limelight.
All good suggestions, but not that many names compared with how many designers you could probably name off the top of your head…
And going back about the Popes at Hadspen – a raved about garden at the time- certainly prompted themselves and their approach to use of colour.
Sorry for typos!
And Keith Wiley. Huge self promoting professional!
Keith Wiley is an interesting case.
He and his late wife were almost impossibly shy, but he’s now a bit more ‘out there’. I strongly suspect that his talks and so on are all down to the need to make money to survive and keep the garden going, but there has also been a lot more interest around Wildside in recent years.
But certainly when I’ve met Keith over the years he’s generally reluctant to even make eye contact with people, let alone to promote himself!
Excellent piece here. Having worked in both capacities, as a professional gardener and as a garden designer, I think plant knowledge has to inform the design decisions to make a truly successful garden. The plant replacements I’ve done for landscapes where designers specified inappropriate plants for the zone/aspect/maintenance needs are many
Thank you.
Plant knowledge is woefully underappreciated here in the UK, and it does show in some of the gardens I’ve seen over the years.
I’d like to throw my name in the ring for a professional gardener ready to champion our work. I’m ready to rant and rant loudly and publicly but I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY GARDENING 6 DAYS A WEEK
An excellent point. Gardeners tend to be very busy people, and the nature of the work means that getting involved in any form of activism has to be done outside of work. It’s very difficult to have a diverse day when you’re in hands-on in the garden all day.
Because I don’t live in the UK, your titles/descriptions of head gardeners, elite garden designers, community gardeners, professional gardeners, freelance gardeners, and the mow and blow clan is foreign to me. It leaves my head spinning. I also had no idea social status had anything to do with this. I didn’t know there was a horticultural hierarchy and that some of this depended upon whether or not you were affluent.
The US may use some of the same titles, but they don’t necessarily equate to the same thing, especially depending upon where you live in the US. Are we the mutts of the gardening world, whereas the Brits are the purebreds? (Mow and blow in my part of the country means exactly that. Mow and blow workers usually have little or no knowledge of the names of plants or their needs. They are simply skilled at keeping yards tidy and mowed. Do UK mow and blow people do the same thing or do they do more?
Perhaps in the future someone at Garden Rant could compare and contrast the two countries in terms of horticultural titles, their meanings and implied status, and the education, if any, required to hold them. I personally love self-taught gardeners who were modest, but became well-known, such as Dr. Dirt (Felder Rushing’s sidekick) and Pearl Fryar who recently passed away. Although not modest, I believe Ryan Gainey was also self-taught. There are others.
I do take one exception to what you’ve written. I actually would flock to a Piet Oudolf garden to find out what plants he used. But then that’s me.
I think it’s quite possibly the case that we have a more diverse range of job titles than in the UK. Mow and blow is a tricky one though. You’re absolutely right to say that such people focus on cutting lawns and keeping things tidy but seldom know one plant from another, and this is very much the case with these people here in the UK too. The reason I don’t condemn such gardeners is because they’re providing a service that their clients usually want; they tend not to work for people who are more engaged with their gardens.
Your idea of comparing horticulture in the US and the UK is an excellent one. I’ll see what I can do.
And yes indeed there are people who will go to a Piet Oudolf garden to see which plants he has used. My suspicion, however, is that if you’re interested in planting combinations you’re probably also interested in planting combinations in non-big-name gardens too…
Ben, thank you for your insightful essay. There’s a light to unpack, much of it class conscious. The affluent, here in the U.S—as in the U.K.— can afford gardeners, but here they often don’t consider them worthy of wages comparable to plumbers or electricians. I have championed our local gardeners at every turn. We need more good gardeners and clients willing to pay for them. I wish professional gardeners were in a league with pro athletes who can afford to hire agents and handlers with promotional skills. That’s unlikely. I’m a bit obsessed with Lionel Messi this week…
I’ve even heard it said that one of the reasons nobody wants to pay their gardeners more is that it will cause other gardeners to expect better pay and conditions, and that would be morally wrong. That was quite a hard thing to hear.
Of course the thing gardeners have in common with electricians and plumbers is that the best will do a job to a very high standard that just leaves everything working well while the worst will end up costing you money as you fix their mistakes.
I was gifted on the Wild Side by Keith Wiley by a friend because she thought my garden was on the wild side. It is large, about six acres on ten and 47 years old. (I’m 82 and retired designer and installation contractor.) I garden near Seattle. Keith’s name has traveled far and wide.