NICK BAILEY
The former head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden on dabbling in ponds, teaching gardening skills to disadvantaged young people and finding new ways to display snowdrops
When Nick Bailey made his first Chelsea Flower Show appearance, aged 40, in 2016 with a show garden that celebrated patterns in plants and featured many southern hemisphere species, people wondered who this talented new designer was. In fact, Nick, whose day job was head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, had been designing and reshaping gardens since the age of 19 when he was studying landscape design. It’s just that he’d also packed in several other careers on the way: nursery horticulturist, teacher, hands-on gardener, writer and editor, and broadcaster. But after Chelsea he became a much more familiar face when BBC’s Gardeners’ World took him on as part of the expanded team, where his rolled-up-sleeves approach and clear, unpatronising advice to garden owners have won him many fans.
Nick grew up in Norfolk, in a family of teachers, and admits he was a rather unusual ten- year- old, who, when friends came knocking at the door after school, instructed his mother to say that he was grounded so that he could get on with making the ponds in his part of the garden. “Both my parents and greatgrandparents had huge, beautiful gardens, so that was the norm for me.” He learned the craft of gardening from them, but the design fire had also been kindled. “I remember being so excited about spending my pocket money on a single fencing panel to divide up my part of the garden,” he says. Later he was to discover, and devour, John Brookes’s book Garden Design.
His sandwich year on the National Diploma in Landscape and Amenities Horticulture was spent working at Waltham Place, Strilli Oppenheimer’s organic garden in Berkshire, which gave him the confidence to take on his first major redesign, at the five- acre combe garden in Dorset belonging to George and Elizabeth Davies (of retailer Next). He returned to work for the Oppenheimers in their 42-acre garden, Brenthurst, in Johannesburg, which, he says, was probably the best year in his life. “I worked with incredible horticulturists and was given carte blanche on budgets and design to create new landscapes.” In contrast, his next job was for a charity, teaching horticultural skills to young people on the edge of society. “It was incredibly challenging, but also rewarding.” In a year, the social hierarchy changed, with the highest kudos for those who knew the most botanical names rather than those who could punch the hardest.
After a spell editing and writing for garden magazines, he returned to gardening as head gardener of ten acres of walled gardens in Norfolk where he persuaded the owners, who had asked for a neat-and-tidy, mainly turf approach, to allow him to create a series of plant-rich seasonal gardens instead. Four years later, he was on the move again, this time to the greatest challenge of his career: the role of head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, where he would have a staff of six gardeners and some 80 volunteers. “This was a dream role,” he admits. “It was a charity, it provided resources for active research, and it had this incredible collection of 5,000 very unusual plants. The most enticing bit was becoming acquainted with the hundreds of plants whose names I’d never even seen written down.” But he also knew that he needed to make the garden more accessible, both physically and intellectually.
“The essence of any botanic garden has to be education and conservation. We need to open people’s eyes to our fundamental dependence on plants for every aspect of our lives, from food, to clothes, to buildings, to fuel. So many people who are not involved in horticulture or gardening see plants as a frivolity rather than the essence of everything we are.” His masterplan involved transforming the garden into a series of garden areas, akin to a museum, where the collections were regrouped according to their uses (historic and future), and phyto-geographic and chronological connections. Even the garden’s snowdrop collection got a facelift: more than 100 new cultivars were added, and ingenious ways of presenting them, often at waist or head height, were devised, including a tunnel of snowdropstudded kokedama balls, and ‘meadows’ of different cultivars planted among Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’.
While Nick has nothing but praise for the work of the volunteers, their use creates a dichotomy that other managers and head gardeners of public gardens will recognise: “I had to patch up shortfalls with volunteers and was then told I didn’t need another permanent gardener. It means there are fewer roles for qualified gardeners, and it keeps wages suppressed.”
Last summer, Nick left Chelsea Physic to go solo. His new business card reads ‘Garden Maker, Author, Speaker’. Whatever the future holds for this ambitious horticulturist, it will, he says, include “keeping my hands in the mud”. The physical work with plants and soil is clearly what keeps him rooted.
WE NEED TO OPEN PEOPLE’S EYES TO OUR DEPENDENCE ON PLANTS FOR EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES, FROM FOOD, TO CLOTHES, TO BUILDINGS, TO FUEL