When talk almost inevitably turns to profession, my usual response is gardener; here I’m usually cajoled by friends and family into elaborating on celebrity clients and well-healed commissionaires. Apparently gardener is not a suitably august profession, I’m not sure why. It would seem to me to convey exactly what it is I do, it is after all the end product of my labors. But perhaps they are right, perhaps I’m not yet a gardener, perhaps I need to earn the title.

In my curious relationship with the garden, I have spent all my time up until now designing, building and visiting the gardens of others. My years have been spent developing spatial arrangements thematic designs and planted orchestrations to fulfill the aspirations of a wide variety of client. I have been challenged by climate, budget and materials but in truth when a design leaves the drawing board and arrives upon the ground it falls into the custody of they who should look after it.

We always try to keep an eye on all of our creations but the person who does this on a daily basis is truly the visionary for the garden.

If the client is the parent of the indulged designer child then the gardener is truly the holy spirit, all three exist for a garden to flourish, as either separate entities which is where I can ply a trade, lacking funds but with the passion, or as a single person with vision and ability.

Can you be a garden designer without being a gardener. Can you understand the emotional connection to the earth if you haven’t felt the disappointment of a failed crop or the taste and scent of success?

Gardens are an emotional journey as well as being the backdrop for a life. Who owns the garden, the designer from who’s mind it sprang, the client from who’s wallet it was paid or the gardener who tends and sculpts its form, coaxing the new plants into there remade environment, who feels the losses and gains emotionally as a reflection of their care. Is it any surprise that the great gardens of history also had great gardeners?

I have been lucky to work with some great gardeners, initially my grandpas veg. plot was an entire world brought into being annually through his care and attention, left to sleep in the winter when his care turned to Derby County Football Club to be returned a fresh with resumed vigor in the spring, generally to shut out the disappointment of the winter season.

In my working life I have worked with gardeners who not only understood the atmosphere of a planted arrangement but could build upon it over the years training shrubs and adding perennials till the composition was temporarily complete before taking it into a new direction and letting it evolve to the next stage of life.

On the reverse side of this I have encountered the over zealous clipper, removing all semblance of organic suggestion from a plant, making cloud hedges look like over flowing bath bubbles, removing a flower the minute it has served its purpose. This is gardening by photograph and whilst it may serve to fulfill the brief it very rarely allows the garden to evolve.

Upon my return these gardens are often as I left them, some things thriving others not, with the excuse of paralysis, scared to amend the design of such an exalted individual as the ‘designer’ a brief look at the garden will often tell you that what has been left is very unlikely to win any awards.

If your conclusion is that you must be a gardener to then be a designer, why is so little attention paid to this in during the education of a landscape architect a title so highly exalted in the landscape field that gardens are almost a dirty word. During my Landscape Architectural studies, vegetation was barely scratched, a term of plant indents that any moderate gardener could identify without prompt, was deemed sufficient.

Three years at Hort. College prior to this stood me in good stead, that was three years of weekly plant indents ranging as far as the still feared grass seed ident!! A friend of mine studied at Kew and I remember helping with her first year of plant idents, wandering the palm and temperate houses trying to find the most exotically named species, and understanding their climatic needs as well as their obscure titles and lineages. Is it any wonder the success of Dan Pearson, Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough?

If you do not believe that the gardener is important, then what is a garden designer? A contemporary designer used to pre-empt his lectures claiming to know little about planting, you would think the very tools of his trade, this shock tactic, rebellion against the lectures of the past, reeling off names in Latin for others to busily scratch down in their note books barely looking up at the photos of accomplishment they represented, against the exclusivity of this dusty old club, to appeal to a wider audience, An excellent tool to gain attention and create accessibility but perhaps the caveat should be that whilst I know little about plants I’m trying to learn more, I’m trying to become a gardener….