Designer Tom Stuart-Smith explains the thinking behind his garden for the National Gardens Scheme @ngsgardens at Chelsea 2024, which was sponsored by Project Giving Back. Discover the inspiration for his design and his top picks from the garden, including the 'shed' building designed by his son, the water trough and rainwater harvesting system and the plant Saruma henryi.
Find lots more Chelsea videos and stories to enjoy plus plenty of great gardening inspiration and expert advice on the Gardens Illustrated channel and at https://www.gardensillustrated.com/ch...
This is the National Gardens Theme Garden, supported by Project Greenback,
and it is a garden that will go after Chelsea will go to Maggie's
in Cambridge. So it's a garden about really decompressing and connecting with
nature and taking your mind off your personal troubles. If you imagine
that you may have been diagnosed with cancer, you're arriving at a Maggie's for
the first time, and you arrive in a busy NHS car park and you're walking to
the centre, and I hope that you'll be walking through this grove
of hazels with beautiful planting, and by the time you arrive at the centre
you're feeling a little bit more positive about life than a bit better
about yourself. So that is really the core message of the garden, but it's also
about the NGS, about the spirit of sharing and opening gardens.
There are three and a half thousand gardens through the country, and sometimes
people forget about that, and how people, garden owners, really put themselves out
to welcome people into their homes. A rather lovely touch is that
actually quite a few of the plants have been lent by, or given by, NGS
gardeners. So some of the foxgloves, some of the convalaria, some of the
Mattella, a little ground cover plant, have been donated by NGS garden owners,
which is a lovely touch. So if I was to point out three things in the garden
that I'm particularly pleased with, the standout, which everybody, particularly
who goes inside it, just goes wild about it, is the garden shed, which is, I
mean, to call it a garden shed is a bit disingenuous. It's the most, you could
almost sort of move in there and live in there for a week. It's designed by my
son, Ben, which is rather lovely for me, and it's built by Ken Scott Fielder, who's
a brilliant, brilliant carpenter. So it's made out of cleft oak on the outside and
beech on the inside, so rather like a gardener, it's rather rough on the
outside and very smooth on the inside. And the inside is made entirely out of a
single beech tree that fell down. So that's my sort of number
one. Another two, perhaps, is the beautiful stone water vat. Now that
collects the water off the roof of the building. The water
is collected in a terracotta gutter and then goes under the ground and
then up into the water tank, which is rather nice. So all the water in the
garden is recycled. If there was a standout part of the garden, something
that's really attracted people's attention, I think it's probably Sir
Rumour Henry I. And rather uncannily, Ula Maria, in her garden down the bottom of the
avenue, also has a pot with Sir Rumour Henry I, as I do. And we definitely did
not exchange notes or look at each other's garden. It's a wonderful
woodlander from China, discovered by Augustine Henry, and it's not a plant
that you've seen around very much, but I think it's a plant you're going to see
around quite a bit in the future.
