If there could be a mathematical equation for how to create the perfect garden, chances are Helen Elks-Smith would have created it. The Bramshaw-based garden designer, who is one of the designers on BBC makeover show, Your Garden Made Perfect, was recently named as one of the 50 most influential people shaping the UK’s landscaping industry, but her career started out on a very different path.
‘I studied maths at university, although I was always very creative. I used to make my own clothes and every student house I lived in, I’d create a garden with packets of seeds and not a lot else,’ she says.
Helen ended up working in IT, an industry that by the age of 29 she’d become disillusioned with. And so, following the birth of her first child, she began seriously thinking about a career change.
‘I knew I had to do something different and was considering becoming a maths teacher before a friend suggested that it was “pretty obvious” that I should become a garden designer and it just clicked,’ explains the mother-of-two, who moved to Hampshire from London 14 years ago.
That friend gave her £10,000 to redesign her garden, an experience Helen says was ‘terrifying’ but it took a few more years of study – RHS evening classes followed by a degree in Landscape and Garden Design at Writtle University College – before she set up Elks-Smith Garden Design in Lyndhurst in 2005.
Despite not forging a career as a garden designer until her 30s, horticulture has been a constant in Helen Elks-Smith’s life since she was a child. Growing up in Kent, the Garden of England, among a family who ‘lived and breathed’ gardens, she was introduced to some of the gardening greats at a young age.
‘My mother and grandmother would go off to gardens at the weekends and there would be a lot of conversations between them and my mum and dad, pouring endlessly over a plant. The conversation around the breakfast table was always about gardening,’ Helen recalls. ‘I remember my parents seeing Beth Chatto at Chelsea Flower Show and they’d talk about her as if she was a goddess, I mean she was really, but my point is there was this energy that came into the house because of that.’
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Fast forward to 2019 and Helen was not only creating her own Main Avenue garden at Chelsea for Warner Edwards Gin, but she was also made a Fellow of the Society of Garden Designers for her outstanding contribution to the industry.
‘I was so shocked,’ she admits. ‘I was sitting there at the awards ceremony listening to them talk about this person and what they had done in their career thinking, ‘that’s nice’, and then It dawned on me that it was me ¬– the other guests on the table said it was quite funny seeing the penny drop.’
The following year, as the world went into lockdown, Helen saw an advert asking for garden designers to be involved in a new BBC programme that would use cutting edge virtual reality (VR) technology to reveal the paradise ordinary gardens could become.
Your Garden Made Perfect – an offshoot of the popular Your Home Made Perfect, presented by Angela Scanlon – saw Helen pitch against other garden designers including Monaj Malde, Pip Probert and Tom Masey to redesign gardens for members of the public.
‘It’s a lovely show to be on, Angela is a hoot and the whole team is a joy to work with,’ she says. ‘I was quite cynical about the VR headsets. We do quite a lot of fancy 3D stuff at our studio and I just didn’t think the goggles would make that much difference but my word, it’s such great fun.’
Anyone who has watched the show may remember Helen’s emphasis on the way gardens make us feel. A trustee of the Trees and Design Action Group which promotes the importance of trees in cities, Helen has always believed that a beautiful, well-designed garden can have a hugely positive impact on our wellbeing.
‘There’s a fundamental connection and need for us as human beings to be near soil and earth and plants and that impacts how we feel and how we respond to certain things,’ explains Helen, who when not working enjoys heading out into the Forest with her daughter on their horses. ‘My job is about understanding how different spaces and landscapes make you feel and how you respond to space. There are always going to be aspects of a site that are good and bad so when I’m designing a garden, I can move you quickly, I can move you slowly, I can move you to a certain place and guide your eyeline so it makes the most of the positive aspects of the garden and guides you away from the negative.’
Helen, who has won three design awards from the Society of Garden Designers, including the 2020 Large Residential Garden of the year for a garden in Lymington, has been back to visit both the gardens she was picked to design on the show and loves returning to her projects to see how they gave developed.
‘I think those moments, when you go back when the planting has matured, are the real highlights of my job.’ she admits. ‘I mean, who’d be an architect? They build a house and then it just deteriorates from day one, whereas with gardens it’s the complete opposite. We start out and it’s a few twigs and some nice paving and then it just gets better and better over time. It’s a lovely feeling, to know you’ve created something beautiful, that will improve people’s lives and stand the test of time. It’s a real privilege.’
Helen’s Top Tips
• The key thing is to find where the light is in your garden at the times you are likely to be able to spend time in it, and then design your patio, terrace or seating area around that. The best place for a patio isn’t usually leading directly from your house.
• Houses have walls, they have structure but a garden doesn’t, it’s just a space. Plants are a great way to define spaces within your garden so think about what plants could work to do that, rather than always focusing on colour.
• Planting design should not start in the garden centre. When you buy a plant, it won’t look like that six months later so you need to do your research and think ahead about how that plant might grow. That may mean you have to look at a few patches of soil for a little while longer until your beds establish but it will be worth it not to have an overgrown mess later down the line.
Helen’s Favourite Hampshire
• The New Forest has certainly got under my skin. I find it very restorative – out on the open heathland, it changes from morning to night, season to season and has this very quiet colour palate which is incredibly calming.
• Dobbies is my local garden centre, just down the road from our practice in Lyndhurst and Gaze Burwell in East Tisted, makes lovely garden furniture.
• There are lots of lovely pubs in the New Forest. There’s nothing better at the weekend than going for a walk with friends and family and the dogs (Border Terrier Stanley and Labrador Collie X, Otis), ending up in a pub. My local pub is the Green Dragon in Brook and The Trusty Servant in Minstead does great Sunday roasts.
