External landscaping

The impressive landscape setting for The Glasshouse at RHS Wisley is designed by award-winning designer Tom Stuart-Smith.

The external landscape scheme has been selected to enhance the horticultural experience of The Glasshouse.

As The Glasshouse has been created as part of an historic and much-loved existing landscape, this set an unprecedented challenge for Tom Stuart-Smith. Tom’s remit was to meld The Glasshouse into Wisley’s landscape to make a seamless combination of old and new.

Tom Stuart-Smith is known for his creative use of plants and is a well-respected plantsman as well as garden designer. He combines this sensitive empathy with plants with a strong use of form in his crafting of the spatial qualities of garden sites.

The new external landscape for The Glasshouse creates an adjacent garden that complements the new structure, while providing a dramatic new feature garden at Wisley. The design was selected for its seamless link between The Glasshouse to the surrounding Rock, Wild and Fruit Gardens. The planting scheme is designed to reflect the dramatic horticultural spectacle inside and throughout the rest of RHS Garden Wisley.

Relatively formal areas of rectangular paths, lawns and beds lead out from the Teaching Garden and into the rippling curves of the main landscape around the lake. As the curves move away from The Glasshouse, formality returns with the Glasshouse Borders (formally the Piet Oudolf Borders) leading to the Fruit Mount. Tom has enlarged the Mount using spoil from the lake. This new, flatter dome is planted with dwarf myrtle and enclosed by beech hedging and mass plantings of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Roland’.

‘The geometry of the garden for The Glasshouse has the character of a musical fugue. It is not meant to represent a particular piece of music, although I was listening to Bach’s preludes and fugues while I was designing the landscape.’ says Tom. ‘One idea begins and then overlaps with another. The pattern emanates from the main entrance to the east of The Glasshouse, developing into curving and intersecting paths, planting beds, low beech hedges, and lawns to create a series of interlocking sickle shapes.’

The scheme is designed as a large amphitheatre, centred on The Glasshouse and lake reservoir. It includes a glass-fronted café overlooking the lake and draws together a number of important circulation routes in a delicate network of pathways. The Glasshouse garden is bounded by a beech hedge that is irregularly punctuated by openings, connecting the garden to other parts of Wisley.

The network of paths, which includes ‘up’ and ‘down’ routes on the Fruit Mount, should help keep visitors circulating without their presence impinging on the look of the landscape. The network also helps make sense of old and new by weaving together paths from the existing Wisley landscape to The Glasshouse.

‘The rock bank walk and the path through the Glasshouse Borders used not to lead anywhere. It has been like sticking together all the loose ends,’ says Tom who has made a ‘leaner and meaner’ soil on the far side of The Glasshouse to support one of his signature prairie plantings. The soil on the near side of The Glasshouse has been improved to support a rich, textured planting with everything from Magnolia and Cornus to Bergenia .

The visual perfection of the place is enhanced by the lake in front of The Glasshouse. The lake has a double function. On one hand it serves as a reservoir for the glasshouse. On the other, Tom has designed it in such a way that the glasshouse appears to float on the water. This drama is enhanced by the overall amphitheatre structure of the landscape. In years to come the link between old and new will be strengthened by gaps in the beech hedging which will frame various parts of the Wisley gardens.

View the planting plans

Teaching Garden

The external area also features a fantastic Teaching Garden.

Find out more

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