A private garden answers to no one. Freed from the compromises of public commission, it becomes something closer to a confession and a place where a designer’s instincts, obsessions and quiet experiments can run loose.
To mark the publication of Phaidon’s Into the Garden: Private Sanctuaries Around the World, garden editor Clare Foster is joined on stage by designer Tom Massey and Phil Honey, owner of Caisson Gardens, to explore a book that gathers 41 such places from around the world. It moves from Umberto Pasti’s intimate, indigenous-flora sanctuary in Tangier to the pastoral expanses of Sugarloaf Farm in New South Wales – a garden that somehow holds 18th-century England and Kyoto in the same frame – via a romantic Normandy retreat by Cordelia de Castellane and the work of Jinny Blom, Dan Pearson, Tom Stuart-Smith, Sophie Walker and others.
Phil’s own garden is one of the book’s most unlikely subjects: at Caisson, near Bath, he and his wife Amanda have spent fifteen years coaxing a wildlife-rich landscape out of the abandoned locks and derelict buildings of a former coal canal company, turning a piece of industrial ruin into a private sanctuary in its own right.
Clare, Tom and Phil will talk through a selection of the book’s gardens – their design, their planting, and what happens when a garden is allowed to be a site of pure experiment rather than a solution to a brief. At a moment when biodiversity and ecological resilience are no longer optional extras, the private garden emerges as something unexpectedly urgent: a laboratory disguised as a retreat.
Copies of Into the Garden will be available to buy on the night.
Please note that our talks now begin at 6:30pm, rather than 7pm, giving you more time to enjoy dinner at our award-winning Garden Museum Cafe. Table reservations are available here. Your talk ticket also includes entry to the Garden Museum’s temporary exhibitions from 6pm on the evening of the talk.
