Even before she has a cup of tea, Sue Stuart-Smith stretches outside in the morning. She does so on a patch of lawn directly outside her living room, warming up for the day ahead by ‘pulling weeds’ from below, ‘picking grapes’ from above, and ‘axing’ over each shoulder.
All are movements which Sue – a psychotherapist and author with a special interest in the power of gardening to transform lives – might also make while gardening here at home, Serge Hill in Hertfordshire, which she shares with her husband Tom, a celebrated landscape architect. But in these early morning moments, Sue is determinedly unproductive. She has learnt, as she wrote in her book, The Well-Gardened Mind, “to value times when I could just be in, or with, the garden. My favourite part of the day for this is early in the morning… The flowers and hedges have been growing throughout the night (for this is the unseen interval in which plants do their growing) and somehow in the first light, the garden feels more their place than mine.”
So, at this time of day, her green fingers simply stretch for stretching’s sake. Afterwards, which she might have breakfast with her son, Ben, an architect, who has in recent years split his time between here and south London. While the Stuart-Smiths have called Serge Hill home for some thirty years, Tom’s office and team are also based here, and in 2021, they opened the Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health, a community interest company that draws on the couple’s combined expertise. Sue and Tom conceived of the project and, with a team of gardeners, developed a disused orchard into the Plant Library, an ‘educational resource’ for myriad community uses; Ben, meanwhile, designed the Apple House, the building at the heart of it.
Every morning that he is here, Ben will wander down there for a cup of coffee. “Rural areas can easily become enclaves of people with a similar background,” he says, “but there’s always something interesting going on here, and you can have encounters with people from totally different walks of life.” On the morning we visit, a group of year three primary schoolers are here, doing botanical drawings on easels in the Apple House before a vegetable word search in the Orchard, while project coordinator Becky prepares lunch for Tom’s team, using produce from the garden that day: beetroot quiche, roast potatoes, runner beans and purple sprouting broccoli tossed in a herby vinaigrette. Also based on-site is Sunnyside Rural Trust, a charity that offers horticultural therapy and training, mostly to adults with learning disabilities, which has been involved with Serge Hill since the very beginning, shaping the purpose of the project.
Plants are everything to this place, and the Apple House is a horticulturalist’s temple. Only open since June of this year, Ben tells me it is constructed entirely from plants and other natural materials, such as the eco breeze blocks made from local clay, or the cladding, which was sourced from a nearby forest of densely planted oak trees which needed thinning. “Everything is aesthetic here,” he says, “but it’s also structural: the building doesn’t have trusses, purlines, ties or beams, so we have birch ply holding spruce rafters together, and the walls are made from hemp between timber posts.” Natural light pours through large windows that overlook the Plant Library, a gently sloping sweep of land which segues from, as head gardener Millie Souter puts it, “a sandy free draining habitat at the top, where Mediterranean plants are able to thrive, down to a shady woodland area at the bottom.” It is hard to imagine a better setting for the program of workshops and talks they have planned, such as Sue’s on therapeutic gardens, Safe Green Space, in November.
While Sue and Ben agree that plans for the project pre-dated the pandemic, it was definitely shaped by Covid. The Plant Library, for example, had been intended to be something of a test kitchen for Tom’s office – each of the landscape architects on the team were given a plot in order to learn about how plants behaved, not least because many of them commute from London, where they may not have gardens of their own. But the plants arrived the same day that lockdown was announced, the team were all forced to work from home, and the project pivoted. Many of the plants were duplicates, so Tom decided to create a grid system of 1500 herbaecous plants – hellebore, salvia, iris – each in their own one metre square of ground.
Likewise, the Serge Hill Project has been emboldened by Sue’s book, as has “the growing awareness of mental health issues”, which once again have been amplified by the pandemic. “We definitely see that with doctors,” says Sue, “teams are much more aware of the need to look after them since Covid.” Sue currently works for DocHealth, a psychotherapeutic service for doctors suffering burnout and anxiety. While both are separate from her work at Serge Hill, I get the impression she is always looking for ways to connect the dots. “A therapeutic garden is a health intervention,” she writes in her book, and at Serge Hill she is trying to reserve some plots for social prescribing, “when a GP effectively writes a prescription for an activity to tackle all the causes of chronic ill health, such as isolation”.
Sue wasn’t always a gardener. When she and Tom met, as students at Cambridge (Sue read English literature before medicine), she “saw it as outdoor housework”. It was only when they got together and moved to his family home – a family of avid and in some cases professional gardeners – that she became switched on to gardening’s charms. Once their three children were at school, she started to grow her own herbs, then veg. The garden now is full of annual flowers – “I like the shaggy look of them,” she says, “the organised chaos of it all” – grasses and verbena, asters and a vine. These and more are the backdrop to those morning stretches, which, I should add, Sue does in her pyjamas. “I quite often wander around in my night gear until about ten in the morning, before the day claims me – the gardeners have got used to it.”
Does nightwear, perhaps, help to enable the slowness, the un-productivity, that Sue knows is so important? “Ever since ancient times,” she writes in her book, “gardens have helped people bridge the gap between doing on the one hand and being on the other.” The dewy morning – before tea, before clothes – is for simply being. The doing ensues.
Sue wears the TOAST Collage Floral Cotton Nightdress and Silk Velvet Gown. Ben wears the Soft Cord Relaxed Shirt and Soft Cord Relaxed Trousers.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Elena Heatherwick.
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