Stephen Anderton

Stephen Anderton, B.A., M.I.Hort., is a well-known gardening columnist, author, and lecturer whose work is valued for its practical, down-to-earth sense, and his ability to write for a wide audience. He lives near Saffron Walden in Essex, with his wife and three daughters, and is developing a new half-acre garden around an Edwardian villa.

As a teenager he was a member of the National Youth Theatre, and graduated in Drama and Classics at the University of Birmingham before studying Landscape Design. For twenty years Stephen worked in the management of large private and public gardens, and is best known for his restoration work, as National Gardens Manager for English Heritage, at Belsay Hall, Northumberland, and Brodsworth Hall, Yorkshire. Both are renowned for their quarry gardens.

His career as a garden journalist began with commissions from Country Life and The Times, and rapidly grew until in 1996 he left English Heritage to become a freelance writer. As might be expected from this background, he enjoys writing on issues involving both garden and landscape design and practical plantsmanship. He is well known for his weekly Saturday column in The Times, which has been called “sometimes practical and sometimes cerebral, but always well written and informative” by The Royal Horticultural Society’s Gardener’s Yearbook. The column has twice been given the Garden Writer of the Year award by the Garden Writers Guild. He also contributes to other publications, including Garden Inspirations, Horticulture, Country Life, New Eden, The Garden, and Gardens Illustrated, and is the author of several books on gardening.

Stephen is now a Trustee of the Essex Gardens Trust, and Vice Chairman of the Garden Writers Guild. Previously he sat on the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, and was Vice Chairman of the Professional Gardeners Guild and a Council Member of the Garden History Society. In Northumberland he personally held the NCCPG’s National Collection of Spuria Irises, having previously grown over 120 species in Kent, and having been Secretary of the British Iris Society Species Group.

He lectures widely in Britain and internationally, to academic, professional and amateur societies, including the Royal Horticultural Society, York University Centre for Conservation Studies, and Winterthur. Subjects range from the philosophies of garden conservation to the practical and inspirational. He is an occasional leader of special interest gardening holidays and cruises. In addition, he often appears on various radio and television programs in the UK, including annual Chelsea Show coverage.

He also comments on gardening in other forms. Having written chamber music and songs since childhood, he now concentrates on cabaret songs about gardeners and gardening. Writing in The Times in 1996, Jane Owen said of his one-man show "Love and Death in the Garden": “Stephen Anderton’s songs are to gardening what Private Eye is to politics.” As Master of Ceremonies at the 1999 Garden Writers Guild Awards Lunch, he received a standing ovation for a musical satire "The Road to Success", about the gardening media. He has taken part in many charity and public performances, including a Gala Evening for the Prince’s Youth Trust.

At home, Stephen’s own half-acre garden lies behind an Edwardian brick villa in village in north Essex. The garden was begun in 1996. At its centre is a minimalist, miniature landscape garden leading to the Lyceum, a modernist garden building by architect Christopher Bradley Hole. Elsewhere the garden is very full in its planting, making much of perennials, bamboos, and foliage plants. Sculpture figures largely in the garden, including some commissioned in and imported from China.

Books by Stephen Anderton