A sophisticated garden
It was fellow Italian Arabella Lennox-Boyd, one of the UK’s leading garden
designers, who offered him his next job. “I was a bit snobbish at first
about the idea of working on private gardens, but in fact with Arabella I
found my vocation. I worked for her for 10 years on many different projects
in many different countries, and it was brilliant. She taught me a great
deal, especially about plants.”
Watch Paul and Tommaso discuss their plans for the Telegraph garden
By contrast, Paul, 49, was an enthusiastic horticulturist from a young age. “I
was very precocious, telling everyone when I was 10 that I was going to be
an orchidologist.” A German-speaking American, with a grandmother who was a
passionate vegetable grower, he was brought up in Brooklyn and Long Island,
where he entered all the local produce shows “And won!”
Torn between studying art or horticulture, he decided to combine the two and
read landscape architecture. “For part of the course I came to Europe, which
was a second home to me, studying in Denmark, and coming over to England to
look at the gardens.”
After working for a spell in Manhattan, he moved to London, where he was also
employed on big commercial schemes first by Clouston and then Gillespies. He
knew Tommaso socially, and a chance encounter with him on Portobello Road
while he was job-hunting resulted in an offer to join Lennox-Boyd’s
practice. Two years later, in 2000, he and Tommaso decided to set up their
own studio.
“We knew we would work well together,” Paul tells me. “It wasn’t so much that
our strengths dovetailed, but that we had a mutual love of the same things –
a similar aesthetic.”
A modern town garden in Blackheath designed by the pair
“There is a bit of the German-Italian thing going on,” adds Tommaso. “Paul is
very methodical and thorough. I am more bish, bash, bosh – less interested
in the engineering and fine detail.”
They don’t impose a particular style on all their gardens, they told me, but
there are certain motifs. “We like a strong, simple, logical structure with
clean lines,” explains Tommaso. “Nothing too fussy. And with plants
softening the lines.” Layouts are often formal, and their planting veers
more to the traditional than the new-wave naturalistic. “What we love is to
take historic elements, like pleached trees and woven basket beds, and put
them into a contemporary context.”
I wondered how the work was divided. “In the early days, when we were building
things up, we shared all the jobs and talked through everything together,”
says Tommaso. “We still show each other our work and are always aware of
what the other is doing, but mostly we do our own separate projects.” A team
of six works in the office with them.
They have worked on an impressive array of gardens, ranging from Mick Jagger’s
former home in Berkshire and Ronnie Barker’s former home in the Cotswolds –
which sported a red telephone kiosk and much other quirky architectural
salvage assembled by Barker – to a massive chateau in the south of France
with a maze of formal compartments. The Bamford family, owners of JCB and
Daylesford Organic, have been clients for a number of years, and Tommaso has
been advising on the landscape around their home in Barbados, originally set
out by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, which boasts pleached tropical fig trees and a
pergola cloaked in jade vine.
It was Lady Bamford who invited Tommaso and Paul to create their first and
only previous Chelsea garden in 2008 – though Tommaso had worked with
Lennox-Boyd on some of her Chelsea designs. The garden featured a modern
kitchen, wheat fields, and vegetables grown in wicker baskets, and earned a
Silver-Gilt medal.
A quirky backyard space, typical of del Buono Gazerwitz
For the Telegraph this year, they are creating what they describe as a
“contemporary Italian garden”. It will be a green garden, “reinterpreting
traditional Italian elements” says Tommaso, “with a strong axis line,
controlled shapes, pots, roof-trained trees, and a modern version of a
grotto in the form of a water wall.”
At their own homes in London, Paul has a small garden and Tommaso has a
terrace, but for the past five years they have been time-sharing a cottage
in Suffolk together, alternating weekends and surprising each other with new
plants. It is an unusual but rather appealing way to run a garden – given
two people with such similar tastes. However, Paul is reluctant to show me
any photos. “It is a work in progress,” he laughs. Like Chelsea.
A preview of the Telegraph garden 2014
The 2014 Telegraph garden combines some of the guiding principles of Italy’s
great horticultural tradition but reinterpreted for a 21st-century design.
Inspiration for the garden has come from revisiting the components
traditionally found in celebrated historical Italian gardens, to create a
bold and uncompromising modern garden.
All the plants in the garden are both appropriate and suitable for the
conditions typically found in the north of Italy, a climate very similar to
Britain. The garden will be enclosed on two sides by a bay hedge (Laurus
nobilis) and shaded at both ends by the canopy of 12 roof-trained lime
trees. The sunken lawn at the heart of the garden will be punctuated by domes
of clipped box and Osmanthus x burkwoodii. The formality is softened by a
range of herbaceous plants in deep blues and lime green with a touch of deep
pink. Modernist touches include stylish outdoor furniture and a dramatic,
glittering wall of water at one end of the garden, to calm the hubbub of the
show.
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