The growing popularity of garden guru Dan Pearson
Instagram pays court to the Roger Federer of rhododendrons
If you’re not green-fingered yourself, you’d be forgiven for not having heard of Dan Pearson, but for decades his has been a name to conjure within horticultural circles. Now, the explosion in popularity of gardening over the past year or so, as locked-down homeowners discover the joys of time spent in their own green spaces, as well as in public parks and gardens, has made Pearson, at 57, an unlikely social media star. He has 56,000 Instagram followers tracking both his professional work and his more intimate, diaristic updates about life in north Somerset, where he moved last year after 28 years spent in London. (You can find him @coyotewillow).
“I think the pandemic has made people think about what has value and how easy that connection can be with nature,” says Pearson, over the phone to Esquire. “All you have to do is go out and walk in it to be part of it. And it can be small-scale: people’s windows crammed with houseplants, or young people keeping a few shrubs on a balcony.”
When he was five, Pearson watched his father dig a pond at the bottom of his family’s garden in Petersfield, a commuter town in the shadow of the South Downs. He marvelled at the strange alchemy of this new world: dragonflies, water lilies, pond scum, the fact that this empty hole could fill with life in such a short space of time. By the age of 10, he was working on Saturdays at a public garden, spending all of his spare money on bulbs and soil.
At 17, he began studies at the Royal Botanic Gardens’ School of Horticulture, Kew. Speaking to The New York Times, Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Garden Museum, called Pearson, “truly a wonder child.” Pearson is a “pioneer in perennial planting,” Tim Upson, director of Horticulture, Education and Communities at the Royal Horticultural Society, tells me.
Today, Pearson is perhaps the world’s most in-demand gardener. He and his team have designed landscapes and environments for Sir Paul Smith, Jony Ive, the Amanyangyun hotel in Shanghai, Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London, and Juergen Teller’s west London studio. “Dan did three little gardens for me in my studio, which was designed by 6a architects,” writes Teller via email. “I love them all. I look at them, I photograph in all of them. They work for me in all four seasons, they make me happy.”
In 2015, Pearson won a gold medal and was awarded best in show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, cementing his status as the Roger Federer of rhododendrons.
“People come to me for a very particular thing,” he says. “It’s about a proper understanding of sense of place for the garden. It’s about heightening an
atmosphere. Because I’ve spent so much time looking at gardens in the natural world, mine have a soft edge and are planted with nature in mind and a light hand in terms of control. They are relaxed and good for the environment. Plants that are easily pollinated and have a simple, honest beauty.”
Each morning, Pearson walks through his own garden, two acres — the land it sits on is 20 acres — of planted hedgerows and wild meadows, a decade’s worth of love, toil and expertise, quietly searching for inspiration to post on Instagram or his own online magazine, Dig Delve. There might be a video of magenta cyclamen, neon pink and swaying in the breeze, sheep grazing in the morning mist or sakura (cherry blossom) framed by an unlikely and perfect blue sky. Living vicariously through photos of his muddy spade and terracotta pots brimming with plant life with reassuringly complicated Latin names, Pearson has become a thoughtful and informative online guide to our new interest in gardening, both big and small.
“Nature has its own momentum,” he says. “It’s oblivious. Each day something different is happening in a garden. I walked out this morning and the wild garlic is out and there are trails where the deer have been that weren’t there yesterday, all these lovely things that you observe daily. I’m just glad that I can share them.”
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