As open garden days go, it doesn’t get much more thrilling than a visit to Serge Hill in Hertfordshire where the global landscape design superstar Tom Stuart-Smith and his wife Sue, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, live and garden. It’s a unique place, a combination of home and office, cocooned in gardens and greenery. But there is one garden that I am particularly interested in and it’s not even officially a garden at all.
It’s called the Plant Library, but you’ll find no books lurking in this one-acre former orchard that now is crisscrossed with paths laid out on a grid system. The library is made up of 1,500 herbaceous perennials and shrubs plus 400 bulbs. Each plant has one square metre. They are grouped in tens, with pathways separating them.
I was expecting some sort of Dewey (which does sound rather herbaceous) Decimal System but instead it’s organised by soil preference as well as sun and shade. At the top of the slope, the “soil” is 15cm of sand plus 5cm of grit. These plants — which include lavenders, euphorbias, gauras, kniphofias — are never watered. Halfway down the slope, on the shadier and comparatively damp area, there is clay soil. Here grow the likes of hydrangeas and phlox. In between are the “tweeny” plants. No similar plants are placed next to each other and each group of ten has its own QR code for identification.
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The first thing that hits you as you walk the grid is that it is beautiful in a completely random way. It looks like a gorgeous living herbaceous patchwork quilt. Tom says he sometimes does have a desire to impose himself on the planting, moving one plant or another, but then stops himself. “This is not intended to be a sort of taste-making operation,” he says. “It’s about information.”
Serge Hill is spread out over one acre
VIKKI RIMMER
The idea of a library evolved but from the start both Tom and Sue knew that they wanted a garden with lots of variety and scope to be used by volunteers in their Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health, a not-for-profit scheme that revolves around education and training (and now includes Sunnyside nursery). Sue, the author of the seminal book The Well Gardened Mind, has expertise in health and wellbeing, while Tom has vast horticultural experience as well as a worldwide reputation.
The initial plan was to have the plants chosen by the landscape architects who work in Tom’s studio here, with an aim to expand their plant knowledge. But then all of their thousands of plants arrived on what just happened to be the first day of lockdown in 2020. “As I was lining them out, I thought, OK, another tomato-coloured echinacea, another sort of beige achillea,” Tom says. “I just thought, this cannot be the right model. Everybody’s just ordering a fashionable thing they’ve seen in magazines.”
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But what kind of garden, he and Sue wondered, would provide maximum scope for volunteering and learning? “Almost the most important criteria, from the point of view of volunteering, is that it should be unhierarchical. So it shouldn’t appear to have a designer’s hand in it. It should be more about looking after plants.” Both Tom and the library’s head gardener, Millie Souter, choose the plants. On the day I was there, which included a Plant Fair Roadshow sale, they had scooped up about 30 new ones.
How long do they keep plants? “Until we get bored with them,” Tom says. “It is like a library in that respect — you know, if you think we’ve had that for years and I’ve never even got it off the shelf to look at it, you know then that’s the time to dig it up and get it away.”
The site was once an orchard
VIKKI RIMMER
The grid system, which feels as if it should be dull, is actually quite liberating. There are no designed paths guiding us this way or that; you can dance along the grid any old way you want. You can stop and smell the flowers, identify them, learn their names. It is in this way that the Plant Library is used for schools and volunteers. It also provides plants, via propagation, for Sunnyside.
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Garden designers and nursery owners also come, to be inspired and, not least, to see what a plant looks like in the ground as opposed to a pot. Because the sand plants are not watered, they need to send their roots down deeper to get a drink. As a result, many look spectacular. “Sometimes if I am doing a plant design and it’s sort of five o’clock on a Friday afternoon and I’m feeling a bit run out of gas, I will just go down there and have a look and think, ‘Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of you,’” Tom says. “That’s the really nice side of it.”
The Plant Library can be visited on family open days on Thursdays in August, as well as at various other opportunities. See sergehillproject.co.uk
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