Gardening’s hottest property

He’s in demand all over the world, now Tom Stuart-Smith’s been put in charge of the RHS’s vast new showcase garden

He rarely appears on TV and doesn’t churn out gardening books, and is far from a household name. But ask knowledgeable gardeners to name Britain’s most influential living garden designer and many would say Tom Stuart- Smith. No wonder he’s recently been put in charge of one of the most exciting gardening projects in Europe – the Royal Horticultural Society’s new garden near Salford.

It will join the RHS’s showcase gardens at Wisley in Surrey, Rosemoor in Devon, Hyde Hall in Essex and Harlow Carr in Yorkshire and is expected to attract a million visitors a year, who will come to see the best British gardening principles – from inspirational planting to ingenious design – put into practice.

The ambitious £30 million project aims to restore the historic lost gardens at Worsley New Hall, built for the 1st Earl of Ellesmere in the 1840s, to their former glory. The magnificent 156acre plot included a formal terraced garden with fountains, woodland, sweeping parkland and a huge 11-acre kitchen garden, but it fell into disrepair after the First World War.

The new garden – named RHS Bridgewater after the nearby Bridgewater Canal – is being opened in stages, starting in 2019, and is a huge project, even for a designer at the top of his game. Tom, 56, is in demand all over the world, with about 50 projects on the go at any one time and commissions as far afield as India and Morocco. He’s won eight Chelsea gold medals, including three Best in Show awards, but says he’s unlikely to design another Chelsea garden (though he’s still on the judging panel for the show). He grew up in Hertfordshire, where he still lives with his wife Sue, and has been gardening since he was a child. He went to Eton and then read zoology at Cambridge. ‘Even as a student I visited gardens whenever I could,’ he says. ‘I had the gardening bug but I never thought it was something I could do as a job.’ Meet i ng legen dary garden designers Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Lanning Roper inspired him to forsake the life of a scientist and take up garden design instead.

His trademark style is a structured garden layout softened by naturalistic planting, typically employing drifts of grasses and long-flowering perennials to swooningly lovely effect. He describes it as ‘an overlay of formality and informality’, and believes it reflects the fact that he started as a scientist and then changed to design. ‘My work has always brought those two different aspects together – the more rigorous side, and the romantic.’

Now he’s the ‘master planner’ for RHS Bridgewater. ‘It’s a fascinating place,’ says Tom. ‘It’s absolutely covered in trees, some of them 60 or 70ft high, which have to be removed. The walls are all there, though some are in a bad way. There’s an incredible amount of work to be done.’ Tom himself is designing two key areas: the 11-acre walled garden, and the area around the building through which all visitors will enter. Is he apprehensive? ‘It’s very exciting, and a bit nerve-racking,’ he admits. ‘I don’t think there’s any country in the world that feels as passionately about gardening as we British do, so I know people will have strong opinions about it.’ There’ll surely be many sleepless nights as the garden comes to life, but you feel if anyone can pull it off, it’s Tom Stuart-Smith.

Tom’s Italian Garden at Trentham, Staffs, and (below) the outhouse at his own garden in Hertfordshire