Tom Stuart-Smith on Landscapes, Legacy & The Uplifting Power of Nature

Tom Stuart-Smith· Guest0:00

[gentle music] I started living in this place when I was twenty-six, which, um, had no trees on it. It was an open field. It was fifty acres of wheat. Everything in that environment, you know, we planted. It's almost like having two parallel families, a sort of vegetal family [laughs] and a human family growing up at the same time. There's quite a lot going on, and sometimes it seems like too much, and then suddenly, you know, I'll spend two hours in the garden and everything sort of falls calmly into place again, and these things which seem insuperable difficulties three hours before suddenly are pushed back into perspective. There's quite a lot of sort of nostalgia in that and maybe sort of self-reflexiveness that, that you, that you're walking through this thing that you created, and then you have this uncanny feeling that, that it is having almost more of an influence on you than you ever had on it.

Matt Gibberd· Host0:50

[gentle music] Hello there, and welcome to a new episode of Homing. I'm Matt Gibberd. Today's guest is the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith. Tom's designed gardens at places like Chatsworth, Tate Britain, and The Hepworth in Wakefield. He's won no less than nine gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show and was awarded an OBE in 2023. But long before any of that, he grew up here on the Surge Hill estate in Hertfordshire, which was originally bought by his grandfather. Tom spent his childhood climbing its trees and staging Shakespeare plays in the garden. And apart from a brief spell away,