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An Interview with John Brookes MBE

Sandy Felton talks to the pioneer of the "room outside" John Brookes MBE and finds out why he thinks a new discerning eye is needed to integrate  more of us into our landscape.

I was influenced by John Brookes very early in my gardening life. Here was a designer I could identify with, someone who had a freshness and vision that appealed to me, who broke away from the hitherto staid and formal ideas of what a garden 'should be'. His concept of a "room outside" was perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist of the ‘sixties’ and he was an inspiration for young gardeners like myself who wanted to foster an affinity with nature without destroying it.

Today, he is one of the world's most influential garden designers having created over 1,200 garden designs for clients throughout the globe and he has inspired generations of designers with his teaching, lecturing, books and magazine articles.

Perhaps, most importantly, he has taught us that a garden is far more than a space for growing flowers. Indeed, in his new book 'John Brookes Garden Design Course' he makes the pertinent comment that: "Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are increasingly adopting a stance that we are not superior to nature, and forcing a plan upon it, but that we are part of it and are becoming more and more sensitive to it."

After working for Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe, he went on to study landscape design at University College London before setting up in private practice in 1964. Towards the end of the ‘swinging sixties’ his concept for using small urban gardens for entertaining became established.

At the start of his career he admits that he was influenced by reading books from the States, particularly the work of people like Thomas Church. He explains: "I worked for some time on an architectural magazine here and I could see that most architects hadn’t a clue about what happened outside the front or back door and the combination of the two made me start thinking of that space outside there, it wasn't a cottage garden or country garden scaled down to urban proportions - it had to be a new sort of concept." The rest is, as they say, history.

To a degree he was also influenced by Islam: "I had started getting into Islamic gardens because I had been to the South of Spain and I had worked in Iran." He says. "It was a wonderful two years in Iran and I thoroughly enjoyed it."

The Inchbald School had been asked to set up an interior design course in Iran and he was asked to go out and lead it. When he returned to the UK, Islamic gardening was not particularly popular it being 1980. However, eventually the re-discovery of Lutyens and Jekyll enabled a re-awakening of Islamic gardening principles. Lutyens work in India had used lots of Islamic ideas in his ponds and pools and gardeners once again started to appreciated those concepts.

In the Royal Horticultural Society's Bicentenary Debate - "this house believes that the horticultural craft, will determine the culture of gardens of the future at the expense of artistic expression" - John spoke against the debate stressing that when we look back over the gardens of the past 2,000 years, within various cultures, it’s the form of the garden that we remember. He stressed that what is needed now is a new discerning eye to integrate us more and more into our landscape.

His mantra comes from the school that a garden is not a two-day spectacular, the joy is in taking time - time for the garden to evolve and respond to change. It should also be in tune with its surroundings. He sees a new movement in garden and landscape design - one which seeks to take inspiration from land art and suggests the phrase “eco-design” - a search for the roots of our agricultural husbandry.

I asked him about this concept of "eco-design". He explained that increasingly people are getting interested in their health, their diet and herbalism: “To a degree they want to grow their own vegetables and herbs - people are getting more interested in wildlife and birds and increasingly they want to encourage them into their gardens.

"One’s beginning to see the criteria of the garden is no longer the amount of exotics you can grow - it has to be more down to earth and more of its place - obviously there are people who are going to do decorative gardening and carry on doing it, that's fine, but there's an increasing number who want to see what the difference between a garden in Devonshire and a garden in Durham is about and it’s not just to do with its plant material. It's to do with its social history, the material you use to build it. There is a movement away from those rather facile, quick make-over gardens - we are beginning to get our feet under the table and beginning to think much more fundamentally about it all."

So what does he enjoy most about garden design? "I think designing and building gardens for people and their enjoyment of them and their telling me so", he says. “It’s really rewarding and then going back after ten or fifteen years and thinking, ‘oh hello, I had a good day at that one.'"

He fell in love with his own garden, Denmans in Sussex (left), because it wasn’t trying to be grand, smart or Italianate. “It was of its place,” he says. "A garden on rather poor gravely soil. I liked it because it wasn’t trying to be too sophisticated and formal, it had spaces in it and it roamed about – it was cosy I suppose". His favourite part is his own corner where he can potter about. "Increasingly, it becomes a public garden and not mine, but that little corner still is mine. I just want somewhere that I can leave messy!"

How refreshing that such an iconic designer should want to have his own little corner to leave messy if he wants to. I have long held the opinion that we are becoming too obsessed with neat and tidy beds and borders and missing the real joy of gardening which should be a natural habitat. On that we are firmly agreed!

Denmans is a wonderful 20th century garden planted for all year interest, nestling in the West Sussex countryside. Here he has combined native species with many frost tender plants creating an amazing showcase for his work.

For the past 40 years he has brought inspiration to countless designers through his lectures both from his own garden at Denmans as well as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the New York Botanical Garden, and in the South of France, as well as in Canada, the Middle East and Australia. His books such as the seminal Room Outside (1969) and Garden Masterclass (2002) have sold in thousands.

So what, if anything, encourages him about today’s design: "What encourages me," he says, "is that one dare say the word - (design) - publishers wouldn’t let you put the word on the cover of a book because it was a very big switch off – now its being talked about."

He is, however, concerned that we are are not teaching students and gardeners to look: "People don’t see," he explains:  "They go to a neat postage stamp garden and they see the neat edges, and think it’s a wonderful garden - nobody goes through the process of what natural form and beauty are about. It’s quite difficult to write about as well. It’s a whole life process, and I think this is beginning to dawn on people."

He realises too, like most of us, that global warming is going to challenge  how we manage our gardens: "We are going to have to think about sustainability," he says. "Where is the water coming from if we are going to have these droughts? I don’t think anybody is quite sure it’s for real just yet, you still get some jolly cold nights even though its hot in the summer, so you can’t be too risky with plant material. It’s how you interpret that into say Cumbrian or Kentish terms. It’s by looking more closely at your landscape and what is around your garden than by going to the South of France and trying to copy that."

In 2004 he received a justly deserved MBE for garden design and services to horticulture. In that year too he received the Award of Distinction by the American Association of Professional Landscape Designers. His latest book, ‘John Brookes Garden Design Course’ (reviewed in our book review section) is an inspirational workbook which takes the reader from the basics of simple surveying through to the author’s celebrated use of a design grid to detailed styling and planting design. It promises to be as hugely popular as his other titles.

He now combines international commissions and lecture tours in Europe, the USA and throughout the world with his practise and writing. It was a genuine pleasure to talk to him and indeed be inspired by him. If you would like to visit Denmans log onto www.denmans-garden.co.uk for details.