JOHN BROOKES MBE FSGD
We take it for granted these days that our gardens should be beautiful, stylish, usable extensions of our homes. Until the 1960s, however, our attitude was very different. Large or small, country or urban, the garden was somewhere to practise horticulture and show off our ability to tame nature. Flowers had their place, trees had theirs, and edibles were cultivated in a plot hidden away.
In 1962, however, Architectural Design magazine draughtsmanturned-garden-designer John Brookes broke new ground, literally and metaphorically. He built an RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden that was intended not just to be admired, but was structured like a sitting room. The gardener could practise his or her craft and then sit down and enjoy looking at and being surrounded by it. In John’s first book, Room Outside (published in 1969), he shared the ethos behind his designs: that gardens are for living in, as well as being places in which to grow things, and that the garden provides us with an opportunity to find the best way to live with nature.
His career, which spanned 50 years, was spent travelling the world designing public and private gardens, including the College Green Garden, Westminster Abbey, and the English Walled Garden at Chicago Botanic Garden. He also taught garden design to generations of students at the Inchbald School of Design and later, at his own school, Clockhouse, at Denmans in West Sussex, where he lived and worked on his garden from the 1980s onwards.
Sadly, John died in March this year, shortly before his book,
A Landscape Legacy (£40, Pimpernel Press), was published. In his introduction, a brief, forward-looking overview of his own memories of an influential life in gardening, he wrote: ‘Travel, differing landscapes, the experience of other cultures, twentieth-century art and my hobby of gardening have all been a huge influence on my work as a landscape designer. These experiences have opened my eyes to all sorts of things. I feel very much that garden people are very often hemmed in by too close an association with plants and gardening, and their experience should be far wider.’
The restored gardens at Denmans will reopen to the public during the first weekend of June this year. For more details, visit denmans.org.