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.

 

Interview with Stephen Anderton

Timber Press: How did you first become interested in the role of the garden in urban spaces?

Stephen: I have lived in central London as well as in deep country. I especially love the way urban gardens have no relationship with a surrounding countryside, and are much freer to experiment and do bold things with their designs. Yet, so often, people design gardens which are frenetic without being peaceful. Above all else, these gardens need to be peaceful, as an antidote to the surrounding hubbub of the city. It seemed to me there was a need to look at how people designed their city gardens, in whatever style, and look at how people can make those spaces sanctuaries against city hubbub, as well as satisfying people's stylistic preferences. So, this book is about making gardens peaceful — whatever the style.

Timber Press: Do you have a favorite sanctuary of your own, or one that you visit often?

Stephen: My own garden is my sanctuary. There's a busy road on one side of the house, but on the other is our own private kingdom, secluded on all sides. It focuses on a sculptural bas-relief wall — a massive, simple construction 30 feet long — upon which the light can play and the shadows of trees and bamboos can flicker. It's an ever-changing essay in light and shade and proportion, and really very restrained. People ask if I get bored with it. The answer is no, because it is designed to be interesting and peaceful at the same time. The garden is full of horticultural interest, of course — that's my life. But overall, the abiding impression is of peacefulness.

Timber Press: Do you consider yourself a "plantaholic" and if so, what is the best part of being one? The worst part?

Stephen: I am a cured plantaholic. There are not many of us about. I can honestly say, "Hi, I'm Stephen, I'm a Zone 9, and I'm an ex-plantaholic." It's because I spent 20 years gardening professionally, working with a huge range of plants in great public and private gardens. Like all young gardeners, I had the urge to collect and to have new plants. It's a vital learning process. But then at about 40, I saw the light. I thought to myself, why grow things that will do better for other people? Why grow plants that do not add enough to the picture of my garden and its design? I learned to say no, and to enjoy learning about plants without having to have them myself. Of course, you never get to know plants so well as when you grow them yourself, and even now I will buy plants I have not a clue about, just to see how they tick. I have to have my bit on the side. But I can resist having new plants just for the sake of it in my garden proper. I want peace there, even if it's made with fantastical, colorful plants. I am prepared to settle for the discipline that peacefulness requires. And so the self-indulgence of being a plantaholic has had to come to an end. I just have this fling, now and then, in the vegetable patch.

Timber Press: You write cabaret songs about gardeners and gardening. What is your inspiration for these songs?

Stephen: That's easy. Let me say first, you cannot write songs about gardening itself. Pruning is not the stuff of lyrics. Mechanical things are not dramatic. My inspiration is in why people garden. After all, it's an odd thing to do, to spend so much of your time battling with nature when so many more people are content just to let their surroundings be as nature or the city leaves them. When you really look at why people garden, the reasons are usually deeply personal. Some do it to get away from their wives. Some do it to find husbands. Some do it so they can have handsome young gardeners to watch from their windows. Some do it because they are in love with dirt, or ecological correctness, or garden history. Some do it purely to make money. It's the drama of people's lives, their attitudes to gardening which interest me, which make for dramatic songs. And in a song of course, you are licensed to be many times more cruel than you could ever be in print! You can get away with murder, and I do.

Books by Stephen Anderton