Whose Garden is it Anyway?

Many years ago, when I was first starting out in garden design, I visited a new client in London with a senior colleague who I worked with.  Although the house was a rather grand regency villa in an affluent part of London, it had a small, rectangular garden. The owner was explaining what he wanted, which included…

“A rockery in that corner with water running down to a small pond.”

There was an awkward silence for a moment, before my colleague said conversationally:

“I always think that a rockery in a city garden looks a bit like a dogs grave.”

To say I was taken aback would be an understatement. However, the owner heeded the ‘advice’ and we went on to design a successful formal garden that answered his (revised!) brief.

Despite the unorthodox nature of the encounter, I learned a couple of things from this. Firstly, it is always good to be honest with clients, even if it sometimes awkward. Secondly, they hire us partly for our expertise, so if something is genuinely a bad idea – in terms of design or functionality – then it is important to tell them so.

But are clients coming to us for our expertise, our ‘taste’, because we’re well known, or because they like our style? This raises interesting questions. If they come to us because of our design style, should every garden be in that self-perceived ‘style’? Many designers have what they consider to be their own unique style, distinct from just a process or approach to a project. For some designers, this is so evident that one of their designs is instantly recognisable. Are their clients self-filtering to a significant level here? In other words, do they only come to that designer because they want their garden to look exactly ‘like the photo’? And if that is the case – in some cases at least – the result becomes a triumph of style over substance. Ultimately, the designer becomes trapped in this and can find it difficult to move on from the format.

Our studio does not have a ‘house style’ as such. Nonetheless, we have clear ideas about what we want to do and what we don’t think is good. The conflicts come when clients suggest things that are fine in terms of practicality, but not in terms of taste. Sometimes I just say that.

I currently have one client who literally uses me as a taste monitor – walking around a nursery with him, he would point at things and say – ‘What about this?’ ‘Naff’, I would reply, and so on. That’s fine, because that was what he had asked for. I should add that this was after two or more years of design and a trusting relationship. This particular individual is a cultural outsider, and I suspect that he is trusting my judgement as to what are ‘taste’ norms rather than that I have ‘good taste’. After all, taste is a totally subjective matter. Like many things associated with gardens, it is largely about displaying one’s relative wealth and education. This was one of the things that was so wonderful about Christy Lloyd. He subverted (or upended?) the cultural norms of taste and didn’t care. Bright colours and Dahlias were suddenly ‘back’ again.

On which note, we recently presented a planting scheme to another client. It was all in tasteful mauves, pinks and blues, with dashes of white. They looked through it with us before the husband said –

“What you have to understand about us, is that we like gaudy.”

“The gaudier the better” added his wife.

Not only did this make me chuckle, but it was good. We could give them what they wanted, even if it wasn’t what we would  do in our own garden.

This underlines the importance of listening to clients. Although this wasn’t one of them, there are occasions they might make your toes curl so much that you want to walk away. And sometimes that is the right thing to do – the old ‘can I put my name to this’ question. But mostly, the best schemes emerge through protracted conversations with clients. The owners adapt their brief as the conversations go on, and often the designer’s ideas also evolve until you are both in the same place.

So, whose garden is it anyway? Clearly the client’s, but surely the answer is that you must both be equally proud of the end result, or the process is not working correctly.