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When an interior designer finishes a project, they hand the keys back to their client and walk out of their lives. When a garden designer finishes a project, it is, in many ways, just the beginning. No matter how much money is invested in the initial design and build, gardens need years of care and attention in order to thrive. Small, immature plants need help establishing. Enthusiastic self-seeders must be kept in check. Many larger plants need pruning and shaping. Well-balanced ecosystems require intervention. Planting needs to be reviewed, edited and added to. You could, of course, pave over everything: lose the plants, carpet your lawn with green plastic turf and turn it into a kind of outdoor sitting room. But the truth is, anything that resembles a proper, living garden requires proper care.
So new gardeners — and those not so new — shouldn’t worry if they find themselves struggling with the workload: gardens of any size can be overwhelming. But seeing your garden as less of a space to maintain and more of a space to enjoy and engage with helps alleviate the pressure of feeling like it should look a certain way. Even if you fully embrace the wild, rambling country garden aesthetic, you’ll probably find it still needs to be gardened, as decorative artist Tess Newall and her husband, furniture designer Alfred, discovered when they bought their home at the foot of the South Downs in southern England.
Harry Hoblyn, head gardener at Charleston in East Sussex, says horticulture as an art form is undervalued. Established and characterful, the garden helped them fall for the house in 2019. “It was about the place and the feel of it, and the garden was a huge part of that,” says Tess Newall. “It’s very all-encompassing, you feel like you’ve entered another world. I like the overgrownness, it felt familiar to me because it was not at all pristine.”
While the Newalls loved the charm of the mature and informal garden, it took them a while to realize they needed help with it. “We probably didn’t imagine being people who had a gardener — especially as we like the overgrown cottage garden feel,” says Newall, four years down the line. “But a growing interest in [the garden] meant that we wanted help from someone more knowledgeable than us. It became apparent that even creating a ‘wild’ garden still takes work.”
Managing a garden — in the professional sense — takes not just knowledge but creativity too. It is only through practice, working with the living world and navigating all the challenges that brings, that you can craft and curate and coax a truly beautiful garden into being. It’s often not mentioned in glossy garden features: exactly how many hours of hard work, and expertise, go into creating these spectacular places? How many gardeners are employed? And how much does it cost?
“I think a lot of people are put off gardening because they only see perfect gardens,” says Greg Loades, author of The 30-Minute Gardener, who thinks our collective lack of reverence for gardening comes from people viewing their outdoor spaces as just something else to look after, cleaned and kept on top of. As opposed to, say, a beautiful opportunity to connect with the land. Horticulture as an art form, it’s hugely undervalued.
To remedy this, professional gardeners need not only more visibility but better pay. The average national salary for a full-time gardener in the UK, isles that are globally renowned for their grand and influential garden history, is just £23,000 a year — the average salary in the UK is more than £30,000.
“Horticulture as an art form, it’s hugely undervalued,” says Harry Hoblyn, head gardener at Charleston, the East Sussex home and studio of Bloomsbury group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. “There are some amazing artists in the gardening world…”
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