Tim Smit doesn’t bother growing vegetables on the steep, southeast-facing
terraces of his garden in Fowey, on the south Cornish coast. As he points
out, he has rather a good supply elsewhere - where someone else does the
hard work. He is talking about the restored 400-year-old Lost Gardens of
Heligan, 12 miles away near Meva-gissey, which he owns. Opened in 1992, it
is one of the most popular gardens in Britain, with 300,000 visitors a year.
Should Smit fail to pick up a lettuce at Heligan, he could always nab one from
his other garden – the Eden Project, a 34-acre site near St Austell, which
holds almost every species you can think of (5,000 in all). “Since we opened
Eden, we have put nearly £900m of new wealth into Cornwall – more than twice
the entire European budget for the southwest,” he says.
Smit, 53, who was born in Holland but educated in Britain, was awarded an
honorary CBE in 2002 for his contributions to science and leisure. He talks
passionately about his projects in a gravel-pit timbre, fed by a constant
supply of cigars. “There are very few great garden designers around,” he
says. “There are an awful lot of domestic ones, which is just one grade up
on DIY. What passes as great design is like sub-sixth-form art history:
‘Look at me doing something bold with hard landscape.’ There is little
in-your-face great and bold and visionary stuff.”
He does, however, admire the work of Roberto Burle Marx, the avant-garde
Brazilian landscape designer – “I love that modern-art approach to
gardening. It’s rock ’n’roll, it’s wonderful” – as well as that of Dominic
Cole, who worked on Heligan and designed the Eden Project. “Dominic’s
challenge at Eden was that I said, ‘I want Picasso meets the Aztecs, with a
wow factor of 11’ – the shortest brief ever.”
Gardens have featured in Smit’s life since an early age – he remembers the
large walled one his maternal grandparents had at Hartford Hall, in Cheshire
(now a hotel), with “the smell of box and fresh raspberries and chicken
boxes, where you would get the eggs from under warm chickens. I had a very
romantic notion of it”. Romance of another type began in a plant-filled
setting: “The first time I kissed a girl passionately on the lips was at
Sissinghurst, at night,” he recalls. “It was next to where I was at school
[Cranbrook]. We found a way to break into the garden.”
It is surprising, therefore, that, although associated with two of the most
exciting horticultural projects of recent years, Smit admits he has only
recently got the bug himself. “I’ve suddenly decided I like it,” he says. “I
get real pleasure out of growing nasturtiums and sweet peas. I still find it
a minor miracle.”
Smit has grown some rather stubby-looking sweet peas in planters on the decked
lower terrace at Fowey, but gives full credit for the rest to the joint
efforts of his son Alex, 28, who did much of the planting, and Cole, who
designed it. Indeed, for a man who describes himself as a snake-oil
salesman, and could talk the hind leg off a donkey so entertainingly that it
wouldn’t begrudge the loss, he loses his bottle when it comes to discussing
his plants. “Er, there’s that solomon’s whatsit . . . is it hon-esty? [It’s
solomon’s seal.] It’s really lovely.” Or: “I can’t tell you very much about
the garden. Why don’t you make it up?”
The house and terraces overlook the Fowey River, bobbing with sailing boats.
Smit, who worked as an archeologist before changing to the record business
as a songwriter and producer, moved there seven years ago. “It belongs to my
mother, but she stays here very rarely,” he says.
“The house was in a pretty bad state. It hadn’t had anything done to it since
she bought it in 1992.” Behind was nothing more than a steep slope with a
few stone steps cut into it. “It was a completely wild patch. It made sense
to do that first.”
Alex and “a whole bunch of lads” worked for eight months, chipping away at the
shillet (Cornish shale) cliff by hand.
“It would have been impossible to do without a lot of labour,” says Smit.
There is no access for machinery. As for his contribution: “I just
supervised from a distance; it was seriously heavy-duty work.”
Smit may know little about the plants themselves, but he has learnt enough
from Heligan and Eden to know that they should be in harmony with their
geography. “Heligan is so romantic and moist; here is a much drier
composition,” he says. “Also, because it is by the seaside, I wanted it
almost to be as if I were in my father’s house in Grasse. I wanted it to be
quite plain, in a Mediterranean way.”
Smit’s prime concern was that the garden should be easy to maintain, not only
because cuttings and weeds have to be taken through the house, but because
he travels frequently.
By carving a series of terraces from the hillside, Cole has created a set of
“rooms” from which Smit can look at the river. Although the plot is long and
narrow, the winding paths make the journey through the garden seem more like
an adventure, a “Florentine wiggly procession up the slope”.
There is a very different mood to each one. The paths, walling and paving on
the top terraces are made of slate and wood, which almost disappear into the
landscape when viewed from below and play tricks with the perspective as
they merge into the jungly greenery at the top.
The walling (which also acts as raised beds) on the bottom two terraces is
painted white and the steps and flooring are made with decking, which gives
them a more nautical theme, while plants such as agapanthus, rosemary,
Geranium maderense, myrtle, lavenders and rustling grasses convey the hot
Mediterranean feel Smit was after. On the lowest deck is a jauntily striped
hut, intended as a retreat, where he can pursue yet another interest –
writing novels.
The trouble is, Smit feels too relaxed when he is in it. “It is a bit
difficult to write tales of urban angst with a view that good,” he admits.
“I need the tensions of an office – I’m not one of those guys who can sit on
a beach to write.”
Smit hasn’t entirely forgotten his Dutch heritage among all this southern
planting. “Buried in here is a bunch of especially green tulips [‘Spring
Green’]. There is a period of about two weeks when all these beds burst
through. It was part of my attempt to find out whether the tulip growers
were fibbing to me about the fact that they are only annual, as I hate the
fact that tulips are annual. It’s the strange breeding the Dutch go in for,
though they are getting better. It is not the most environ-mentally friendly
business in the world, let’s be honest.”
Smit recently put in a large tree fern and bamboos on the top terrace, to go
with the gunnera and hellebores, so there is even more strong foliage to
create a Heligan-like verdancy. “It’s nice to come here and have a drink or
two of the healing balm. All you need is a glass of wine, a few plants and a
view.” Your own private Eden, in other words.
