INTERVIEW
‘THE BEST IS STILL TO COME’ Recipient of the SGD’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award, David Stevens FSGD, 11-times RHS Chelsea Gold medal-winning designer, author, educator and broadcaster, talks to Arabella St.John Parker about design heroes, crazy paving, and the garden that got away
A ABOVE: the B&Q garden, in conjunction with The Princes’ Youth Business Trust, Gold Medal winner and winner of the Wilkinson Sword Trophy Best in Show at RHS Chelsea in 1990. BELOW: acclaimed modernist garden for Citroën at RHS Hampton Court in 1998.
few weeks before the SGD Awards ceremony in London last year, I travelled down to Bristol to meet Professor David Stevens FSGD FCI Hort., to talk to him about his career in garden design. As we sat in a garden that he had recently reworked and extended for a cherished client, I began by asking him about his early memories of gardening.
Image: GAP Photos/Clive Nichols
It seems like a long time ago but I am a Cornishman and we lived on the coast so I remember being on the beach and as I walked back to our house, I would see plants such as Euonymus and Valerian, although I had no idea what they were then, and everywhere, marigolds – what a lovely colour they are. Dad was a keen vegetable grower and Mum liked pottering in the garden, but they were not gardeners, and I never had a
revelation that I was going to be a gardener or garden designer.
In which case, what career path did you think you might take?
People never really talked about career choices at that time, and certainly no one talked about gardens or landscaping. My first job was in marine underwriting followed by a brief spell in the police force before working as a technical rep for a gold leaf supplier.
What brought you into landscape design?
I eventually joined a landscape gardening practice when the owner, who I played squash with, asked if I could do some design drawings for him. When the practice went bust, I set up on my own in 1972, building gardens, doing crazy paving, laying turf, and it was then that I knew that I wanted to design.
David Stevens Professor David Stevens FSGD FCI Hort, recipient of the Society of Garden Designer’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement of the Year Award. david-stevens.co.uk
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2022
GARDEN DESIGN JOURNAL
17
