Hands on and Kew-trained: why paying more for a top English gardener is worth it

“Finding the right gardener is the difference between a garden that feels like a hotel and one that feels like a home,” says landscape architect Marian Boswall, putting her finger on the current zeitgeist.

Instead of dashing off to the snow or the sun, families grounded in their country estates have seen their gardens with fresh eyes and the brief for what they might look for in a tip-top gardener has changed.  “The important thing is to get a gardener with an understanding of horticulture, not a garden maintenance team – it isn’t a nine-to-five job and they have to love the garden as if it was their own”.

Ambitious building projects have been put on hold and there has been a surge of interest in atmospheric plant-led gardens – often with an edible ‘kitchen garden’ element.  But where do you turn to find this new kind of hands-on gardener who will bond with the garden rather than just create immaculate stripes on your lawn?

"Really good gardeners are like gold dust" explains Angel Collins, renowned for creating quintessential English country gardens with billowing romantic borders. She prefers to keep her ear to the ground for someone local rather than turn to an agency and has nurtured a team of three gardeners from scratch at one of her most ravishing Cotswolds gardens, teaching them on her weekly visits.

They are not trained but they are keen to learn and have transferable skills. The head gardener is a former welder with a natural gift for topiary: "It works brilliantly".

Top London designer Butter Wakefield agrees that finding someone with a "tender touch" is "as rare as hen’s teeth". She also trains her own gardeners but often ends up visiting clients’ gardens herself – recently to switch on the irrigation in the London property whilst her clients were hunkered down in the country.

Now more than ever she advocates "paying more than you can" for highly skilled gardeners and employing specialists such as James Todman to protect expensive box topiary from the devastating caterpillar moth, or Chris O’Keefe from London Wisteria to renovate the three-hundred-year-old wisteria that is overwhelming the façade of your Kensington town house.

Marian Boswall’s design practice even offers a ‘garden mentor’ in the form of exceptional gardener Caroline Jackson (so good she ‘examines the examiners’ at RHS Wisley) who regularly gardens alongside a head gardener "like a private tutor" communicating the subtleties of the designer’s vision in a practical way. But what do you do if you have just acquired your dream house in Gloucestershire and you need the ultimate gardening team without a designer to guide you?

Discreet and knowledgeable English Country Gardeners, recommended by Arne Maynard, has been in the business of matching gardeners to gardens for 31 years both in the UK and internationally. They can find a passionate sole gardener for a "horticulturally intense" exquisite acre or a super-experienced Head Gardener "who has it all" from managing a substantial team to machine maintenance.

The degree-level Kew Diploma or the Professional Gardeners’ Guild training scheme, which includes experience on three different estates, is an ideal starting point, but this kind of position also requires someone with outstanding communication skills and the ability to understand the needs of  demanding clients.

Bubbling up under all this is a new kind of creative plantsman/gardener who offers a more flexible approach. Sussex-based James Horner has impeccable credentials: the first Christopher Lloyd scholar at iconic Great Dixter and long experience on prestigious international projects for Luciano Giubillei.

On his books are an exquisite garden in Notting Hill, where he continues to ‘add layers’ to the planting, and a large Sussex garden where he both teaches the gardener and grows the plants himself for a truly bespoke service.  Kew-trained Alexander Hoyle has recently mentored a team of gardeners in Azerbaijan and creates exuberant planting in containers for London terraces  - including entire romantic country gardens in baskets for decorators Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler at their Pimlico Road showroom.

He designs whole schemes or offers advice - "I’ve done a lot of simplifying Nineties gardens that are just too much" and has just returned from a trip to look at potential country houses with a client, spurred on by the virus. In this new world, you could find yourself doing everything backwards and employ a gardener to help you grow a garden.

Six top trends for big-budget lockdown gardens

1. Edible borders

Ask Chelsea gold winner Jekka McVicar to design your dream herb garden.

2. Enormous containers

These will make a small Belgravia terrace look bigger and will look timeless on an extensive York stone terrace. Try Italian Terrace for terracotta, Architectural Heritage for verdigris copper.

3. Romantic meadows 

Create long grass with mown paths and hidden clearings to create romantic places to sit.

4. A whole garden in a pot 

Get a country garden, in miniature, in town; try exuberantly planted containers from Alexander Hoyle.

5. A garden mentor

Hire a top plantsman like James Horner to add a layer of planting to bring your garden to life.

6. Specimen topiary

The essential velvety green backdrop to romantic summer planting. Try Architectural Plants.

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