Located in Bloomsbury, London, John Davies Landscape is a dynamic design and project management studio with a fast-growing reputation for creating beautiful and elegant garden spaces imbued with an atmosphere of peace and refinement. The studio’s style is both architectural and contemporary with plants placed at the heart of each design and they work on a wide range of projects on a broad scale, taking on anything from the smallest garden jewel to much larger country gardens. The company also specialises in roof terraces and planning work for commercial scale projects…
Our studio in Bloomsbury is very close to King’s Cross station and is therefore a great location for us, giving us relatively quick access to all of our projects in London and further afield. Of course, it also makes it easier for clients and suppliers to visit us and the choice of lunch venues is bewildering! It’s also exciting to be so close to so much that’s new and exciting in the world of landscape architecture…”
John Davies
C&B: “John, it’s great to have you featured as one of our TOP 10 GARDEN DESIGNERS 2024! What first inspired you to become a garden landscaper?”
JD: “Like many landscape designers, I’m a career-changer… for example, I’ve pretty much sung for the whole of my life starting off as a chorister in my father’s church choir and ending up as a professional opera singer. That didn’t always go smoothly and like many actors, I periodically found myself ‘resting’ between jobs. At this point I found gainful employment as a labourer for a landscape contractor – as you do! I learnt the basics and a whole new world opened up before me, one which I found incredibly enticing. It was some time before I finally and fully took the plunge into garden design, but I never looked back, having found the second vocation in my life. I thought I’d always be a singer and yet I found something else equally, if not more, satisfying. Landscape design is such a broad church requiring you to be an artist, a philosopher, not to mention an architect, horticulturalist and an organiser. The diversity of the job is such an exciting challenge and I was totally hooked from day one…”
C&B: “What would you say is the difference between landscaping and garden design?”
JD: “I decided from the outset of my career as a designer to use the word ‘landscape’ as for me the important part of this word is the ‘land’. The creation of any outside space is about investigating the relationship between mankind and the land. It’s so good to physically get your hands into the soil when you’re planting as you literally become connected to both land and sky, just as when you stand at the helm of a yacht you feel the might of the ocean and power of the sky and you feel connected to both at once. Our gardens and landscapes connect us physically, intellectually and emotionally to the land that we come from and to which we return – I guess that landscape and garden design are one and the same thing. You could say that there is an implied difference in the scale of these two elements although I chose landscape as I feel it best describes what it is that I do…”
For me, one of the most exciting things is taking on work at different scales in different locations. Our design principles remain the same but with different locations we get to experience diverse soils, growing conditions and therefore we’re able to utilise a broader palette of plants…”
John Davies
C&B: “Which types of plants, trees, shrubs do you most often install, and why?”
JD: “There’s a bit of a joke in Holland surrounding British designers’ penchant for specifying Amelanchier lamarkii, which is a beautiful tree with boldly architectural twisting stems. Well, I suppose they are right. We all do it and I’m certainly one of the culprits. However, there’s method to my madness – they boast such stunning form and are eminently suitable for smaller gardens. The reason for this is they are small leaved so allow the filtration of dappled light and also are slow growing, meaning that they are far less likely to outgrow smaller spaces. In terms of herbaceous planting I really enjoy creating perennial schemes with a mixture of ornamental grasses and flowering perennials and the bigger and bolder the better. It’s so wonderful to see form emerging and establishing through the year that then stands over winter before being cut back ready to go again. Perennials and deciduous shrubs and trees give us this sense of seasonality, which is at the core of what we do, keeping us in touch with Nature’s rhythm. But perhaps my most favourite type of planting is woodland edge, utilizing that dappled sunlight, or part sun and part shade. In both cases I think that form and texture are more important than colour. Of course, we have to consider colour but it’s the junctions of different textures from broad leaf to strappy grasses that catch the eye most and create drama in the garden…”
C&B: “It sounds like you put an extraordinary amount of thought into what you create – which project are you most proud of, to date?”
JD: “There are a few, but the project I’m most proud of most probably has to be Stylus, Old Street. This was a small but beautifully formed commercial roof terrace for an office development by GPAD Architects. There’s so much pressure on space in London and often a roof terrace is the only option for the urban greening that we’re in such desperate need of. We were tasked to create a beautiful break-out space for office workers that really focused on boosting biodiversity, helping to create a wildlife corridor in a very hard urban landscape. Corten steel planters with cantilevered timber benches paid homage to the industrial heritage of the building and formed the base for a roof garden featuring multi-stem hawthorn trees and a perennial meadow scheme. We also created a dramatic hydroponic green wall which dropped down over two levels, clearly visible from street level. The project has been recognized with awards from BALI and the Society of Garden Designers but, for me, the most gratifying thing was to walk out onto that terrace one day at the end of May to be greeted by the deafening hum of bees feasting on the mayflower. What a difference from the original site!”
C&B: “It must have been so fulfilling to see nature thriving in the new setting you created! Is that the most satisfying aspect of garden landscaping?”
JD: I’m equally passionate about architectural form and the softening influence of trees, shrubs and perennials in my work. However, it’s probably my love of plants that helps me to answer this question. It’s the planting that transforms a beautifully crafted space into the most amazing garden and one of the most satisfying aspects of what I do is seeing that moment of transformation in garden-making, that moment in the build process when a site becomes a garden…lifting you from the mundane to the other-worldly. More importantly, landscape design is a vocation to which I always felt drawn but also called. I truly believe that it is an act of service to others and I draw a deep satisfaction from being able to create gardens and landscapes of great beauty that serve to connect my clients to nature and, through that connection, to their true self and a higher plane of existence…”
C&B: “You mentioned somewhere that you gained inspiration via Dieter Rams… how often do designers, architects or philosophers affect your work?”
JD: “Design responses to a site and brief are influenced by many factors. For example, we look at the character and history of the site as well as the general locale. We respond to the architecture and look at the narrative movement from house, via garden to the wider landscape. Philosophy is a hugely important element of conceptual design and in many ways it underpins all that I strive to achieve. Take nineteenth century Romanticism for example; poets and artists were fuelled by the imagination and consistently attempted to ‘pierce the veil’ of the material world in order to access a limitless world of beauty and imagination. For me, garden making is a similar process in which we create an environment that lifts its inhabitants out of the normal world and connects them via the land, to something far more spiritual in nature. The day after I graduated from design college I saw an article published in a newspaper about the German designer, Dieter Rams. He developed a set of design principles often referred to as the ten commandments. This was a huge moment of epiphany for me as his design principles seemed to fit perfectly not only with what I had just been taught but with how I really felt about design. This really gave me the courage to step forward and become a designer. How about ‘weniger aber besser’ (‘less but better’) for a slogan or Rams’ frame of reference for the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi as exhibiting the attributes of tranquility, simplicity, balance and liveliness? That’s what I want my gardens to be imbued with! Architects are also often a huge influence on my work. Design at its best is a act of collaboration sometimes between many parties. The opportunity to collaborate with an architect during the earlier stages of the design process can deliver hugely exciting results. My work with architect and client at Stylus, Old Street is a case in point where the design outcome was truly the result of a three-way collaboration. Finally, on this huge question, it’s massively important to have design icons in your life, or designers whose work you aspire to emulate. Designers, such as Tom Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson, Andrea Cochran, Peter Walker, Bernard Trainor all immediately spring to mind…”
C&B: “Is climate change altering your approach to gardens? If so, in what way are you taking this aspect into consideration?”
JD: “For sure. The eighteen month period from October 2023 to February 2024 is the wettest on record. From a purely practical point of view this has created difficulties in garden installation that we are still learning how best to navigate. Hard lessons have been learnt and we have to adapt rapidly. This, for example, might mean choosing not to plant over winter due to the levels of moisture. We also have to adapt our palette of trees, shrubs and plants in order to create a level of resilience that will give our gardens longevity moving forwards. We have to find plants that will tolerate wetness as well as heat and yet there are no guarantees that the climate will change in an easily predictable manner…”
“As our climate warms, we’ll find that certain native species will fade away so that we have to find replacements from warmer climates. There will be an extended period of adaptation where exotic species will become naturalised but we are just at the beginning of this process. I suppose the good news is that our profession attains a level of future-proofing as greening the planet becomes more and more essential but we need to find ways of achieving resilience in planting. The movement of re-wilding is so exciting from this point of view and there is much that we are learning from the principles of re-wilding not only physically but also mentally and spiritually. Of course, we can’t allow cattle to roam wild over are gardens but, for instance, we can adapt to planting into innovative substrates that encourage plants to become more and more resilient to the effects of drought for example. Where conditions allow, we can create gravel gardens where plants literally grow through the gravel substrate. But we are also looking for biodiversity so, as has been demonstrated at Knepp, we can consider creating diverse planting environments within a single project. By utilising or creating landform we can create dryer and wetter sunnier and shadier environments that increase biodiversity…”
“Finally, it wouldn’t be right not to mention sustainability which of course is another major piece in the jigsaw of our adapting ecology. We now have to think about the sustainability of materials as well as the carbon footprint of the gardens that we create; it’s not cut and dried though. Questions often arise while we’re designing such as: ‘Do we use a more eco-friendly type of concrete or do we not use concrete at all?’, ‘How practical is it to specify a rammed earth wall instead of concrete or brick?’ And ‘Can we guarantee that that rammed earth wall will not have some form of cement added?’ By becoming aware of these issues we can answer the concerns and help educate more and more people as we begin to navigate the sea of changes that we now face…”
