CHAPTER FOUR Harmonizing
Gardens are all about the lives of others. They make perfect settings for all the excitements of life, large and small. By using a carefully selected palette of ingredients for a garden it is possible to make something that harmonizes perfectly with its position. Designing with the right choices of materials allows the garden to settle seamlessly into place. Seeing a design intimately welded into the landscape is a joy I always strive for. The old adage of never using more than three materials in a scheme struck a deep chord with me, and runs like a heartbeat through the work. Materials that are fluently understood and confidently used mean the end result will sing.
There’s something of Little House on the Prairie about this that I could never have anticipated. I think it’s due to the rather un-English pitch of the cedar shingle roof. The flowery mead has been a big success and the harmony created between weathered timber, wise old trees and drifts of colour is beautiful.
Loving the tune
Always start by going for a walk locally. Understanding a location is really at the very heart of good design, and the sponging up of information that can occur on a quick amble is priceless. Often I find that the combinations of materials I notice as being particularly beautiful are the product of either an accident of building or immediate necessity. One of our urban projects has a stretch of wharf wall to the river. Originally built over a hundred years ago in brick, it was later fixed – obviously in a time of financial trouble – with roughly poured ballast concrete. The result is strangely beautiful. Coarse and misshapen, it has become colonized by Virginia creeper and little mosses. I look longingly at it knowing it would be impossible to replicate, as it was thrown together with urgency and thoughtless freedom.
The English village where I live is very old indeed and has been built and rebuilt over hundreds of years. Far from being just an historic relic, it is also a contemporary community and has some amazing examples of 1960s Brutalist architecture, and more recently prominent modern buildings have been grafted onto spaces between the older cottages and villas. This results in some striking and unexpected combinations of materials and expressions of style. It appeals greatly to my aesthetic freedom. Because of the interconnectedness of the village houses the gardens all seem to blend together and tie everything into a homogeneous whole. All materials can, therefore, be attractive if sympathetically combined.
The door to my garden in France is over a little culvert that flows down to power the walnut mills in the medieval town. In autumn when the nuts ripen, the rivers rise and the watermills creak into action to make walnut oil. Effortless engineering and visual harmony.
Gardens are a great environment for personal expression and experimentation. In the space of a few metres in the village there is a very correct English garden with immaculate lawns, pleached lime trees and pretty gravelled paths. Next door is a hugely imaginative Italianate garden that the owners have made over forty years, with terracotta-tiled paths in intricate designs, mosaics, extravagant urns and classical sculptures. This freedom of personal expression is made possible with the imaginative use of materials.
It sets my teeth on edge if I see the wrong stone used in the wrong place, or a jumble of different types of stone paving all mashed up together. Understanding local materials is always a good way to start. Spending a little time discovering if you are in an area with a particular type of stone or brick is a good preparatory point to a comfortable design.
This is the route to a turf-roofed sauna. I didn’t want to build anything too overbearing so just adopted Neolithic detailing and rafted a walkway across the marshy ground. It’s thrilling to be able to walk over impossible ground and see the life that goes on in it.
I’m working up a scheme that marries together very tall old mellow stone walls with some original old red brick walls. The two colours and textures blend beautifully together and so I’ve determined to continue with the same stone type – albeit newly quarried and newly cooked soft red brick. A friend, the historic buildings architect Ptolemy Dean, taught me that it’s better to use new bricks made in a traditional way than source reclaimed. Ptolemy always advocates using new materials for historic schemes. The traditionally made bricks will age beautifully and very quickly, whereas the reclaimed will always retain that beaten-up look. Of course, if beaten up is what you are after, then that’s a perfect fit, but in this instance, against an interesting historic house, it would look cheap.
At the same house I’ve been looking at ways of detailing a large courtyard. To have an unbroken expanse of gravel would look unfocused. I chose to add a perimeter pavement as a border to the gravel – about 1m (3 feet) wide of rough-hewn stone cobbles. This is quite a traditional response, as these cobbles would have originally been used as stable floors or routes to outbuildings. They are completely in keeping. We make them from rough new walling stone, lay them on edge and chisel them back so they are comfortable to walk on. They would look at bit too rustic in front of the grand entrance, so here I switch to using opulent great slabs of beautifully sawn stone from the same quarry. I have been told that I specify stone slabs ‘at the limit of human endurance’! And I respond that if people didn’t make the effort, we wouldn’t still be enjoying the Pyramids in Egypt!
I invited David Wilson, the great Scottish stone artist, to make this chalk drystone wall for me. I’m obsessed with the qualities of chalk and it blends so beautifully with the planting – all chalk tolerant.
Small courtyards can take a lot of detail, as they are intimate spaces and prettiness is valuable. I discovered one of my favourite details in a very old house in the country. At first, I couldn’t quite work out what I was looking at. Tiny pebbles set in moss? No, wrong colour and the texture wasn’t stony. It turned out to be sheep knuckle bones. I did more research and found that in the 18th century bone was often used as a paving material. It must have been plentiful and cheap. If you aren’t a vegetarian, it can be an interesting option, but probably quite tricky to source these days. So instead I’ve used small pebbles. Pebbles are plentiful and cheap, although a fiddle to lay nicely. Lots of decoration isn’t my thing so I avoid swirling patterns and many colours. I just like one or two sizes in the same colour and then set out simple geometric patterns that relate to the space. Once they are settled with pots full of plants placed on them, they resolve into a timeless beauty.
It is important to consider the effect our consumption of materials has on our world. This tends to underpin my choices. I’d rather use local materials because they are visually harmonious and will tend to be appropriate in more ways than one. They suit the local climate, they don’t travel far and as they age and degrade they simply fall back into the earth they rose from.
I’ve an Armenian friend who is an eminent master woodcarver. He began carving at the age of four at his grandfather’s knee. Skills with tools and understanding the properties of different woods ran fluently through his veins before he even reached the age of apprenticeship.
I’m a fan of straightforward methods of making things. We made this very squat heavy gate from two layers of oak planks clamped together with iron studs. This is a traditional way of making doors and the advantage is that it’s very hard to hack through it with your sword. No one wants to blunt their weapon!
More oak planks and some chicken netting ford a flooded ditch. This couldn’t be simpler really.
Water, walls, trees and the billowing planting of the cutting garden all combine into one misty whole. On plan this garden looks highly structured (see here ), yet here it is easy to see all of the elements in harmony.
Creating context
In search of clarity
It is really important to think about what you’re trying to create. Whatever materials are chosen must have a strongly thought-through rationale and appropriateness to the place.
I love huge flagstones. On one project I had them cut at 1m square (10 square feet) in rich thick sandstone. The house is old but the paving needed to be brand spanking new and designed in a contemporary way, as it ties a modern stone-built pool house to a big graphite tile-lined swimming pool and also the house (see here ). Using a rustic finish stone would make it ungovernable and the detailing of the stone was extremely precise. The garden sits between the old house and the new pool house and I chose to place the buildings facing each other, so the pool can act as a reflecting pool to the magnificent castellated façade of the old house. The landscaping is creating an entirely new context for all the elements. I chose to use a stone very similar in colour and texture to the original house, but expressed it in a very different way. The house is big and imposing, hence making the slabs very large and the terraces sizeable too. The stone needs to balance the house and look meaningful and generous. The detailing on the stone is minimal and precise. We spent a long time creating perfect corners for the pool. Many people won’t notice these little details, yet they make all the difference to the serenity and quality of the end result. And I notice!
The more you think about a suite of materials the more obvious the right choices become.
This cloister in Kenya is so pleasingly balanced and timeless you have no sense that it’s only just been built. I enjoyed creating the paving with tiny rills either side to take the monumental rains away as fast as possible.
Working abroad is always interesting. In Kenya we had to invent a context for the building and that work falls squarely in the lap of the landscaping. With a newly built house I work alongside the architect and find materials that not only suit house-building but also the landscaping. These early complicit decisions mean that the end result will be coherent. There is a beautiful material called Meru stone. As always with an unknown material, it is vital to test it – look at it sawn and rough, wet and dry. This volcanic stone looked really good with a rough surface but awful when it was sawn. So that decided it. It could only be used rough and as it only came in small pieces we were restricted to that. However, this wasn’t an impediment. Again I used a design that I took from my knowledge of France. Streets in our medieval village are made of pale limestone chunks, worn smooth over hundreds of years. I replicated this in Meru stone in Kenya and complemented it by cutting the steps out of the natural rock just below the surface. This blending of small stone with the rock anchored the scheme effortlessly.
The inspiration for much of my work comes from observing the world. This is a rocky path in my hometown in France.
In the Cotswolds and minutes away from the ne plus ultra of Hidcote it is easy to feel self-conscious as a designer. I felt the gardens at Temple Guiting should be in the high ideal of English Romanticism and I emulated that Edwardian feeling here in the long borders of the Granary Walk.
Wooden gates can be as varied as their locations dictate, and around this farmhouse the local material is coppiced chestnut. The wood is humble and used for inexpensive temporary fencing, and that’s how I decided to use it in the wild anti-garden. I designed a really simple gate with a slight detail of varied height at the top, and left the gates propped open in the long grass. They just settled into their bucolic setting and relaxed there.
I think Albert Camus got it right when he said harmony is a matter of how a man lives his life – harmony is happiness.
Pausing on the Granary Walk, it seemed a view was needed to break it up. The interrelationships in the garden need to be made frequently for the place to feel comfortable and inviting. I use doors for this – a sudden sweeping view to the far horizon is captivating. A local quarry was reopened to provide stone of the right hue. We dressed it into blocks for the walls and crushed it for the gravel. It is of the place and of itself correct.
Texture and colour
Sympathetic magic
Natural materials age gracefully, taking on interesting patinas that add beauty to a garden. This process can’t be rushed. I am very careful about what I retain in a project. At Temple Guiting – an exceedingly old house – virtually everything had to be built from scratch or repaired. It worried me that the end result might look too new and too harsh against the old building, so I kept as much as I could of the ancient fabric of the gardens. In particular we had a very battered old gate hanging in a tired old frame. I kept it exactly as it was. The paint on the frame had weathered to a chalky soft pink – a colour almost impossible to replicate. It sits beside the creamy, flaky old Cotswold stone. I loved the soft colour combination and chose to tone the planting into it – soft pink roses and achilleas at their feet. It is a gentle moment in the garden and made stronger for the underlying thought.
Oak takes on a character as it weathers down that is absent when it is newly worked. I made an oak pergola with leaded post caps and wrought- iron hoops to carry some climbing roses. It looked good on day one, but fifteen years later the oak has mellowed as the tannins have washed away and the surface sealed. The lead caps have the traditional milky bloom on them now they are settled and have become more beautiful. I pay a lot of attention to the colours of materials in a garden. Wood and stone harmonize very easily, and it’s worth getting to know them well before you use them to ensure that they do what you want as they age. I’m always looking at paving and stone used in urban environments and researching what it is. It will receive much more wear and tear than in a private place and so you get an accelerated insight into its behaviour over time.
Often the colours in a building material will influence my planting palette. New York bluestone in America lives up to its name. It is a strong deep slate blue with virtually no figuring in it. It influenced an entire planting of blues – I planted Panicum virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’ in great drifts beside walls of bluestone, shot through with occasional darts of orange Aquilegia canadensis . Much to my surprise the aquilegia attracted little hummingbirds that added darts of electric green. Nature often turns up as a fantastic randomizer, adding unexpected colour brilliance.
I designed these tiny gates and railings in tandem with Andrew Renwick, the master craftsman and owner of Ridgeway Forge. Even a small detail well made lifts a garden to another level of sophistication. The deep strong Dutch blue sits perfectly with the stone buildings and Welsh slate on the roof.
Old Cotswold limestone and battered oak with ancient flaky paint needs little more than a weak pink achillea and puffy Rosa ‘Blush Noisette’ to complete the picture.
This house is so handsome it needed very little to dress it up. The front door is rarely used, so, inspired by my favourite painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, a few simple terracotta pots of pale species geraniums were enough.
Accessorizing I treat with caution, yet we had this lovely pot with an interesting patina on it. I stuck it in a bald patch where I’d removed some woody plants and enjoyed the focus it gave to the big bed.
A set of tiny yet beautiful railings and gates stops people pitching to their doom down the external cellar steps. They add a layer of texture between planting and house and merit their inclusion.
Oak, brick and flint have matured into beautiful textures and colours and formed the basis of my palette for the entire garden.
This old piece of wall is like an artwork, even though it was originally thrown together by an impoverished farmer who used everything he could lay his hands on to build his cow shed (above). With the richness of the flint wall, I just needed texture and elegant planting, so chose a bench made of vine root and Rosa ‘Mermaid’, sweetly scented and constant flowering (below).
Making things
Getting your hands dirty
Some projects demand a new and unique approach. Spring restaurant at Somerset House in London was one of these. I sat discussing the new restaurant with Skye Gyngell, the talented owner-chef. Somerset House is one of London’s great Neoclassical buildings and as such has a profound history. Skye was asking for a beautiful indoor dining atrium filled with olive trees, and as she spoke so poetically about her vision, my heart began to sink. Neoclassical it might be but conducive to outdoor olives it certainly wasn’t! It was also quite tight for space if you take into account the hive of activity it would become. I could plant a conservatory garden easily enough but needed to make it special. I wanted to reflect the history of the building somehow. I chose to panel the walls with an artwork I devised. I collected fresh huge gunnera leaves from a friend’s lakeside and reverse-cast them in liquefied marble dust. This material means they look like fossils, like giant crinoids. I felt we needed some sense of antiquity in the space that has the same sort of ambience as one of London’s great museums. Framing the panels in bronze, I used bronze planters to balance the scheme. Cool marble and the richly patinated metal make a very chic combination. Gratifyingly, we won a rather grown-up award for it, beating off stiff competition from much larger commercial schemes around the world. It seems people respond well to the handmade quality of the space. It has an emotional sensitivity inherent in it that makes it comforting to be in.
The tactile quality of the walls I made for Skye Gyngell’s restaurant was the product of my desire to make things with originality and Skye’s love of truthful ingredients (above). We won a prestigious landscaping award for the atrium. This was the leaf as we rolled it into the clay for casting (below). I like having my hands in the materials. You can never quite tell how an idea will perform so there is excitement in it.
On the subject of metal, I always like to design gates and railings for projects. In accordance with my tastes they are usually quite elegant and uncomplicated. Hand-forged metalwork is just so much more interesting than things made of components. All the forgery joins and rivets are so attractive. They are tactile, with their hammer marks and irregular tapers. And I commission mile upon mile of estate railing. This is the beautifully simple horizontal iron railing used on estates to keep sheep in place. The accessories run to field gates and tree guards, tree seats and all sorts, and I just love it. Quite often it really is keeping sheep out, and otherwise I use it in gardens as a transparent boundary that allows plants the freedom to grow as they please. There is something about the juxtaposition of roses and estate railing that makes a garden seductive and sexy. Gardens want sex appeal.
Sometimes I get quite high-tech with making things in stone. In London I wanted incredibly precise inlaid stone in a complex pattern for a terrace. This is very tricky CAD work that we spent a lot of time developing. The stone is cut by precision water jet that works like a laser, and is inlaid by specialists. It is very exciting watching a prehistoric material being worked in such an advanced way, and the results are beautiful. We also cut precise fluidly curved steps based on contour lines. I don’t think this kind of cutting would have been possible before the water laser jet was invented.
I made this bespoke triad of stools for the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour with huge matching planters filled with trees. They are completely handmade and one-off. The seats are covered in Scottish Bute tweed. We won an award for the furniture and the installation, which was very gratifying
This is our very high-tech evocation of the landscape of Lesotho for Prince Harry’s first foray into the Chelsea Flower Show (above). The sinuous contour line steps are based on the minutely terraced hills of Lesotho. I made the rock very mannered in our technical interpretation of that natural place (below). What is easy to conceive and sketch is a good deal harder to make real, and my colleagues Maude and Pernille took on the challenge. Maude’s drawings for the terraced stairs are da Vincian in their complexity. The hard landscaping throughout shared one colour tone – pale dove grey.
Lesotho is called the Sky Kingdom, so the interior of the rondavel terminates in a lens for viewing the sky.
Laser cutting was also used for the pavilion I created for the Chelsea Flower Show centenary for Prince Harry, this time using very strong birch plywood. I wanted to make a rotunda evocative of the shape of primitive houses. The original rondavel dwelling is essentially a timber frame clad in mud that dries in the sun and bakes and is then thatched. They have existed across many cultures and for many thousands of years. I wanted to make this rudimentary structure using all the technology that we have at our fingertips today. The birch ply is a technical timber – not simply cut from a tree but sliced like a veneer and laminated together into a very strong product. It is also environmentally friendly, as birch grow fast and there is very little waste. I combined this with CAD, Rhino modelling skills, 3D laser printing and laser cutting. The rondavel was very high-tech and very beautiful, with an open lens to the sky within it. Our craftsmanship skills have changed beyond recognition in recent years as the technology has developed.
I made this extrapolated sculpture of three circles for the same garden. The first squared circle is a spare frame of bronze, the second a travertine-filled bronze frame with a void and the third a book-matched sandstone disc set behind a travertine throne. The pleasure of making things is unsurpassed.
Art and sculpture
An essay in caution
Art has to be handled with great care outside. Too much can leave a garden feeling overstuffed and visually confusing. I cut my teeth early by working for the Henry Moore Foundation, based at his old house at Perry Green, Hertfordshire. I wasn’t employed to place art, of course, but I learned a great deal by discussing it with the curator, Moore’s old assistant David Mitchinson. Admittedly all the work here is by the same artist, and that helps, but it is positioned in an honest way among Moore’s old farm buildings and in sheep fields and somehow manages to capture the spirit of a man working, rather than someone posing work for effect. I liked that aspect of it.
In Scotland I inherited a large collection of sculpture to place. It was too much. We winnowed it down to a very few pieces, as even with thousands of acres to play with, it was easy for the place to feel cluttered. I ended up siting an Antony Gormley figure in a pine forest gazing towards the loch. The Gormley sculptures are readily recognizable and often seen in groups, so I felt it juxtaposed nicely with the grouping of the tree trunks. Marina Abramovic came over to help me understand one of her pieces and we had a hilarious few days shinning up and down mountains as we tried to situate a piece of her work. In the end we agreed it didn’t really work and it went elsewhere. Art is mercurial stuff. It is very important to feel that it adds something meaningful to a garden, otherwise it runs the danger of becoming decorative, and that’s a thing I don’t care for. I’m just not interested in decoration.
It’s a moot point whether landscape design itself is art or not. I feel the balance between the landscape and the chosen art has to be calibrated sensitively.
In Scotland during the restoration we unearthed this beautiful sculpture, Scottish Orpheus, by Hew Lorimer, which the original owner, Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, had commissioned for his house. It is a poignant piece and sits quietly overlooking the loch, surrounded by flowers, completely congruent to the location.
This was an exhibition piece made for the Jardins des Tuileries in Paris. It was, in some respects, a prototype of a technique I was interested in trying, using moulding and casting.
Antony Gormley’s Here and Here, 2001 found a poignant home in the trees adjacent to the seized-up winch from the old paddle steamer that used to bring visitors to the lodge. I left the trees dense to increase the isolation.
The materials available to us were all local. I decided to use stone in various forms, and chose a smooth site-finished terrazzo in this lovely pale creamy colour for around the pool (see here ). It all tones in beautifully with the surrounding landscape because it is made from it.
Amorphous beds are cast directly into the terrazzo and make sheltered places to hang out. I outcropped a few big boulders into them for texture and as a reminder of the rock-strewn landscape beyond the house.
In the courtyard a quiet mixture of pennisetum, westringia and the native African black olive sit well with the pale Meru stone walls.
Having needle-shaped leaves certainly helps conserve water and makes the westringia, rosemary and erigeron happy bedfellows (above). Our client, right at the very beginning of the work, saved a venerable black olive as the site was being cleared (below). The pleasure of lying beneath it as the pool juts out into the wild is a sumptuous feeling. It’s not uncommon for an elephant’s trunk to appear over the end of the pool. Water is for sharing.
The architect, Alex Michaelis, is an old friend of many years and projects standing and we understand each other easily, so found it effortless to blend the feel of the hard landscaping with the house design. We are both half-French, so the language of hill villages, scarce water and monastic living is in our veins. Making a project like this work well is dependent on creating a local team of like-minded people who can understand and carry out the vision. I was very lucky to meet Michael Dyer, who heads up the conservancy, and drill him for locally appropriate information. We flew in his rickety Cessna over the local estates and I could see the devastating effect of erosion from overgrazing and lack of water. I ended up with a dream team. Llewellyn Dyer, a young Kenyan permaculture farmer, became my chief of staff and helped execute the scheme in tandem with running his farm. Ben Jackson created the hard landscape. He speaks fluent Swahili and is preternaturally good with many idioms of building. We would discuss details, he would translate them into Swahili and the local guys would fly into action. I needed the help on the ground – at one point we had 450 people working for us. The craftsmanship was beautiful.
The gardens are modest in relation to the wider landscaping. They are centred in the internal courtyard and beside the beautiful infinity pool that sits on the ‘elephant ha-ha’ designed to keep the humans safe. The terraces sit above the landscape and allow a ringside seat to all the passing animals.
The courtyard is calm, still and completely protected. Here I used water in a large pool and in pots to cool the space. Using variants of native plants makes a gentle mix of planting, and growing at almost visible speed are three thorny yellow fever trees that will create shade and texture as they emerge from the colonnaded space.
Blending together the people, the materials and the planting with the wider ethos of the conservancy and its overarching responsibility for protecting and caring for nature made this an extremely satisfying process.
The dead cedars that litter the landscape become effortlessly sculptural within the courtyard. I’m happy if they stay and become hosts for the climbers and perches for the birds.
Here is the elephant ha-ha bathed in evening light, showing all the millions of clumps of wild tussock grass we planted to stabilize the earth after the turmoil of building.
I found the five vast pots on a nursery visit and persuaded the owner to sell them to us complete with their little cream water lilies. In the middle of the dry landscape they are tiny miracles of life. Myriad birds visit them each day and the dragonflies are never far away.