One garden designer at the forefront of repackaging gardening for a younger market is 35-year-old Dan Pearson, a Sunday Times columnist, co-author with Terence Conran of The Essential Garden Book, and presenter on Channel 4's Garden Doctors. Pearson could be purpose-made for commissioning editors – committed to his subject, a persuasive speaker, and with the slightly unkempt look of someone who actually get their hands dirty.
Although Pearson enjoys his media exposure and counts himself "lucky to be able to enthuse about gardens to a receptive audience", he wants to reach beyond the nation's back gardens to an audience that has real influence and spending power. He is hoping for a greater dialogue with architects, clients and construction professionals so that landscaping can lose its position as a last-minute add-on, and buildings can be placed in the best possible setting.
Fortunately, Pearson believes that a dialogue is beginning between architects and garden designers. "Perhaps in the past it was less frequent that the different disciplines spoke to each other. Normally, we'd get £3000 out of a £300 000 budget to do the landscaping at the end of the job. Now people are thinking a bit more holistically about how their buildings are seated on the land."
To Pearson, that means considering the orientation, views and setting of a building from the outset of the design, then working with the shapes and forms of the natural surroundings to create a unique sense of place rather than a manufactured landscape. "I'm fascinated by the idea of working with nature, not against it, and looking at the natural environment as a source of inspiration."
Most recently, he has brought his naturalistic approach to the Henry Moore Foundation's Sheep Field Gallery project in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. There, he worked with architect Hawkins/Brown to simplify a landscape that had been built up piecemeal over the decades.
"We wanted to wrap the countryside around the building, and pushed one hedgeline back to open up a vista of grass," says Pearson. He chose a block of planting as deep as the gallery was tall: "You need the right scale between the landscape and the building, so we didn't want a strip of beds around the outside."
An enthusiastic gardener from the age of six, Pearson says his love of plants differentiates him from the "more technical" landscape architects. "I wanted to combine gardening and design, so I looked into landscape architecture, but it offered very limited training in planting." Instead, he started his horticultural training in his teens, working and studying at the Royal Horticultural Gardens in Wisley, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens. Later, he won scholarships to Jerusalem and Uttar Pradesh in India to study planting techniques in different climates.
If architects and landscape architects worked with people who are horticulturally trained, you’d get a much more interesting product
Pearson also took on private commissions while training, then set up his garden design business in south London 10 years ago.
He prefers to keep the business to a "hands on" manageable size, working with just one assistant, Jinny Blom, and letting his reputation build up an 18-month waiting list.
His highest-profile commission was the visitor route through Althorp Park to the memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales, "put together very fast but very thoroughly". Now he is looking forward to a private house commission in Sussex, where a "visionary" client has asked Pearson and the architect to work in tandem from the outset.
All these designs showcase good communication and collaboration between architect and garden designer, but Pearson is aware that they constitute a small minority of construction projects in this country. In fact, he and Blom have a long list of horror stories perpetrated in the name of landscaping.
"Too often, it's the worst-case scenario of hideous subsoil, the wrong orientation and strange views," says Blom. "Then you find that all the space for planting has been left on the north side," adds Pearson.
Then there are the tired old solutions of grey concrete paving and squared-off plant beds and the assumption that a modern landscape suitable for modern architecture consists of hard landscaping with slabs, rocks and gravel: "People just aren't plant-inspired."
To Pearson, the antidote is an informal, soft approach with naturalistic planting: "A dialogue with the environment, not domination of it." Also, landscape design can be integrated into the project as a whole by fixing budgets for gardens and landscaping at the outset.
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