Tom Stuart-Smith

Articles about Tom Stuart-Smith

  • 1998

    • Come into the garden, Karl by June Ducas Telegraph magazine pdf 572Kb

      When it was annunced that Karl Lagerfeld, head of design at Chanel, had booked a corner site for Chelsea Flower Show, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the wheel was being reinvented. The hype! The fuss! It look goodness knows how many pages of fashion magazines to launch it, as well as two dinners attended by glossy magazine editors, whose relationship with the soil is just about as distant as it can be.

  • 1999

    • Gardens of the Millenium by Stephen Lacey Daily Telegraph pdf 3.6Mb

      One of the most exciting changes taking place in the gardening world is the remodelling of the herbaceous border. To some, this will seem like sacrilege. The Gertude Jekyll border, with its buxom clumps of summer flowers, dreamily colour coordinated, tiered front to back, and formally sandwiched between green lawn and crisp yew hedge, has long been the very essence of the English garden. But to do it well requires an extremely high degree of input.

  • 2000

    • Versailles, SW3 by Caroline Clifton-Mogg Harpers & Queen pdf 580Kb

      André le Nôtre, garden designer extraordinaire to the Sun King, Louis XVI, was one of the most influential figures of his age. His schemes - at Versailles and elsewhere - were huge; his attention to details was enormous; and his ideas were revered across Europe for many years after his death in 1700. In England, these ideas gave rise to a huge number of what we now call “baroque” or “formal” gardens (including those at Blair Atholl in Scotland and Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire).

    • Chelsea 2000 Sunday Telegraph magazine

      Grasses, canals and hot orange flowers will be big at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, which opens on Tuesday, but who will win Best Garden? We select six of the strongest contenders.

    • Cross pollination by Jane Owen Gardens Illustrated pdf 1.8Mb

      Years ago, when Lord Justice Sir Murray Stuart-Smith and his wife Joan had six young children and began a kitchen garden, they made their offspring put in an hour a week unpaid horticultural labour. Anything beyond the first hour’s work won a small renumeration.

      It was an unpopular activity but, despite this, Number Four Child, Tom, has gone on to beccome one of his country’s eminent garden designer with Chelsea Flower show gold medals and landscape project like the one-acre garden for the British embassy in central Paris to his credit.

  • 2001

    • Fresh and wild by Derren Gilhooley Harpers & Queen

      When Tom Stuart-Smith creates a garden, his inspirations are as diverse as nature itself. The wild-flowerstrewn plains of America, a renaissance garden in Italy, and the south London house of sculptor Anthony Gormley have all influenced his landscape design for the Laurent-Perrier / Harpers & Queen garden at the Chelsea Flower Show this year.

  • 2002

    • Windsor Castle opens its new garden by Jane Owen The Times

      The 21th century’s first royal garden has been completed at Windsor Castle to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. It includes a bandstand - the Queen’s idea- and cost £400,000, all of which was paid by the Royal Collection, the body that manages the Queen’s pictures and galleries as well as public access to royal residences.

    • Jubilee Salute by Tania Compton House & Garden pdf 576Kb

      Royal Ascot week will have a horticultural flavour this year, when the new garden at Windsor Castle, commissioned by the Royal Household, is officially completed. Tom Stuart-Smith, the landscape architect whose picturesque sheme for Castle Hill won the invited design competition initiated in late 1999, felt that the garden, through which visitors to the castle will walk, needed to be open, romantic and not over imposing: ‘the castle is such an impressive structure that a formal garden would be inappropriate’.

    • A sense of beyond by Christopher Holliday The English Garden pdf 2.1Mb

      It is always fascinating to see how garden designers tackle their own plots, so I was more than usually excited at the prospect of visiting Chelsea gold medallist Tom Stuart-Smith’s own garden at The Barn, Abbots Langley, in Hertfordshire. The L-shaped one storey house comprises most of the living space in the barn, with bedrooms in what were once dilapidated cow sheds, and sits on a plateau facing west, overlooking field and woodland.

    • Ancient and Modern by Chris Young Garden Design Journal pdf 972Kb

      Whether Tom Stuart-Smith would agree or not, his name has became synonymous with technically sound -and beautiful- interpretations of historical gardens. Whether it be the style of landscape designer Andre Le Notre reinterpreted at the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show in 2000, or the historical propotions of a stately home, Stuart-Smith has an inbuilt understanding of proportion and space.

  • 2003

    • Under the greenwood tree by Rosie Boycott Harpers & Queen pdf 948Kb

      Tom Stuart-Smith, three times gold-medal winner at the Chelsea Flower Show, and designer, for the third time, of the Laurent-Perrier / Harpers & Queen garden, has reverted to simpler themes for this year’s event. Indeed, as he says, his designs have become progressively simpler since his very first outing at Chelsea, on behalf of Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel.

    • Wall to Wall by Tania Compton House & Garden pdf 1.8Mb

      The odds against finding a designer who is talented in each of the closely allied but actually very different worlds of landscape architecture, garden design and plantsmanship are very high, but one name springs to mind: Tom Stuart-Smith. In Tom’s case, inspiration from meeting two key characters in postwar landscape design, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Lanning Roper, consolidated a childhood love of gardening, and after reading zoology at Cambridge, he went on to Manchester University to train as a landscape architect.

    • Border Control by Susan Elderkin Sunday Telegraph Magazine

      If you wanted to see what would happen if you crossed a country gent with a bohemian intellectual, you might come up with Tom Stuart-Smith. Tall, lanky, dressed in grass-stained chinos and black T-shirt, the 43-year-old garden designer, a four-time Chelsea gold-medal winner who numbers the Queen among his clients (he designed the new Jubilee Garden beside the entrance to Windsor Castle), lives in a coverted 17th century barn on his family’s estate - or the ‘Stuart-Smith ghetto’, as he calls it, at Serge Hill in Hertfordshire.

    • L’accord parfait Jardins passion & décorations (France) pdf 404Kb

      Fondeé en 1812, Laurent-Perrier est l’une des rares Maison de champagne installée dans la campagne rémoise au coeur de trois vignobles. Au fil des ans, la société que dirige Bernard de Nonencourt depuis 1949, a développé des valeurs terriennes auxquelles elle demeure attachée.

    • Stufen zum Glück by Charlotte Seeling Architectural Digest (Germany)

      Sanfte Hügel, satte Wiesen, üppiges Buschwerk: Die Fahrt nach Broughton Grange führt durch die Art von Landschft, aus der Gartnerträume sind. Hier müsste man die Natur nur ein wenig malerisch manipulieren - schon hätte man das romantische Blumenparadies, das seit über hundert Jahren als typisch englisch gilt.

    • W idealnej harmonii by Agnieszka Keller Ogrody (Poland) pdf 1.2Mb

      Na tegorocznej wystawie The Chelsea Flower Show ogród pokazowy zaprojektowany przez Toma Stuarta-Smitha otrzymał złoty medal (po raz piąty z rzędu) oraz tytuł najlepszego ogrodu w kategorii ,, Ogród pokazowy’’ (Show Gardens).

  • 2004

    • Wall to Wall by Tania Compton House & Garden (South Africa) pdf 1.8Mb

      The odds against finding a designer who is talented in each of the closely allied but quite different worlds of landscape architecture, garden design and plantsmanship are very high, but one name springs to mind:Tom Stuart-Smith. In Tom’s case, inspiration from meeting two key characters in postwar landscape design, Sir Geoffry Jellicoe and Lanning Roper, consolidated a childhood love of gardening, and after reading zoology at Cambridge, England, he went on to Manchester University to train as a landscape architect.

    • A winter’s tale by Galiene Hitchman Gardens Illustrated

      Tucked away in a quiet Cotswold valley, a handsome stone house overlooks a landscape that has been unchenged for centuries. Nothing could be more conventional than the twin herbaceous borders and elegant box-edged rose garden. An allee of clipped yews rising away from the house leads to a walled garden and it is here that the owner has shown his true colours.

    • Return to Splendour by Susan Elderkin Gardens Illustrated pdf 2Mb

      Garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith received a phone call in the summer of 2000 from a client he had just taken on. “There’s some good news and some bad news”, said the client. The bad news was that he and his family were moving, and the old rectory in Yorkshire for which Tom had been drawing uo plans no longer needed a new garden. The good news was that there was a “rather magnificent” new pad that did.

    • The Framing Device by Deborah Needleman House & Garden (USA) pdf 2.4Mb

      How did you come to garden here?
      I was brought up just on the other side of the lane, and this barn - semiderelict, rat-infested, and full of my uncle’s taxidermy - was a romantic ruin 200 yards away. The idea of making a garden around the barn began twenty years ago, but it only got as far as some pencil sketches of abstract cubes and spheres.

  • 2005

  • 2006

    • How I learned to stop worrying and love the steel by Stephen Lacey Daily Telegraph pdf 3.5Mb

      Some time in the winter, deer got into the nursery where Tom Stuart-Smith’s hornbeam hedges were growing and had a good munch. The damage was noticed only after the hedges were delivered to Chelsea. Since nothing less than perfection will do, replacements had to be found in a hurry. Tom had just found his new hedges in Germany when I met him at the showground, climbing out of his black Range Rover and looking as composed as ever.

    • No sleep till Chelsea by Cassandra Jardine Daily Telegraph pdf 404Kb

      These neat rows of rectangles, each barely the size of a tennis court, are hardly an inspiring setting for a garden designer. There’s no house to reflect, no landscape with which to play, no history to incorporate. Yet this is what Chelsea Flower Show provides, and every year our top designers have to conjure up magic on these blank patches.

  • 2007

    • Quiet revolution Garden Design (USA) pdf 952Kb

      If any designer epitomises the state of British garden design at the moment, it is Tom Stuart-Smith. After a quiet start as a designer working on historical conservation projects in England through the 1980s and 1990s, Stuart-Smith burst to prominence after 1998 with a string of six gold-winning gardens in just nine years at the Chelsea Flower Show, which really put him on the map as a designer.

    • Splendor of the grass by Patrick Kinmouth Vogue pdf 1.5Mb

      To walk through Tom Stuart-Smith’s gardens, for alll but a few, is not to see them as he does. Being unusually tall, he always has a bird’s eye view, but with his hawkish good looks an elegant bird of prey would be typecasting for the bird in question. In any case, his preference is for things seen from above, and to share his vision we climbed to the roof of a gray stone house, Mount St John in Yorkshire, where he has recently been commissioned to redesign a garden on a grand scale.

  • 2008

    • Trentham Gardens by Charles Quest-Ritson Garden Design Journal pdf 804Mb

      Trentham has always been an iconic garden. It was meant to be. Sir Charles Barry laid it out for the super-rich second Duke of Sutherland. It was Barry’s first major commission and he chose the Italianate style. There were balustrades, statues, parterres, fountains, clipped yews and a broad central axis than ran from the house for 250 yards until you arrived at a cast of Cellini’s Perseus on the edge of Capability Brown’s lake.

    • Predicting trends by Carol Klein Guardian Weekend magazine pdf 256Kb

      Perhaps my most dreaded question in journalistic terms is “Which plants are going to be in fashion next season?” Can plants be fashionable? And if they are, who decides they are?

      At Chelsea Flower Show it’s often obvious what is the next fashion - that’s when the same plants, and often the same plant combination, crop up again and again.

    • Go Green by Margherita Lombardi Gardenia (Italy) pdf 840Kb

      Calma, eleganza e semplicità hanno caratterizzato l’edizione 2008 dell’esibizione de piante e fiori più famosa del mondo, il “Chelsea Flower Show” di Londra. In particolore nei giardini allestiti per l’casione, su progretto dei migliori paesaggisti e con il generoso impegegno degli sponsor, hanno prevalso pacatezza e un certo understatement. Verde il colore dominante, nella maggior parte dei casi subordinato a forma, geometria e struttera.

    • Macchie di colori vivaci by Samantha Gaiara Gardenia (Italy) pdf 1.6Mb

      Nelle sere d’estate, quando la luce evidenzia i gialli, i rosa e i viola delle fioriture, questo giardino dà il meglio di sé. Siamo a Trentham Garden, realizzato intorno al 1849 nello Staffordshire dall’architetto Charles Barry (1705-1860) il quale, ispirandosi ai giardini italiani rinascimentali, colmò i cirica dieci ettari di terreno, distribuiti su due livelli, con balaustre, fontane, tassi potati, lunghi viali e ampli parterres.

    • Established landscape by Megan Wyler Diarmuid Gavin’s Garden Designs (Eire)

      On a crisp, sunny morning last April, I had my first glimpse of Broughton Grange. I spent the day setting out spring planting with the man behind the masterpiece, Tom Stuart-Smith. Also with us was his delightful head plantswoman, Henrietta Courtauld, who gracefully made sure that everything went according to plan. Broughton Grange makes a dramatic first impression by its sheer size, and by its unique, contemporary take on a walled garden.

  • 2009

  • 2010