The Barn Garden
Tom and Sue have lived together at The Barn, in Serge Hill, Hertfordshire, since 1987. Tom was born here, and it is where his family has lived since 1924. They have created a world-renowned garden at The Barn and have been actively improving the landscape in and around Serge Hill for many years.
The following video of the garden was made for an exhibition on Tom’s work, the first about a living garden designer in the UK, that was held at the Garden Museum in London in 2011. The video includes a poem, ‘Garden and Growth’, written, in 2004, and narrated by Sue. A copy of this poem can be found below the video.
Garden and Growth
The garden represents a kind of timeline in our lives.
It has grown and changed alongside the growing up of children and family.
It started out with stone picking the fields,
hand sowing the meadow and planting embryonic hedges and trees.
In the beginning it was an idea of a garden and over time it has formed a place
with a unique sense of being, like a baby becoming a person.
While you look away from it, it silently gets on with growing
and then surprises you when on looking back you see how far it has come on.
The trees that were once saplings are suddenly strong enough to hold a hammock
and create a place within a place to retreat to.
The garden is peopled by memories as well as by plants:
The water fights, the Easter egg hunts,
the long summer lunches, the games of partridges.
Layers of memory are grafted onto the place in our minds.
Just as memories are a resource, so the garden is a resource.
It is a repository of beauty – something to turn to when tired and empty.
It gives back much more than it takes.