My First London Home: Tony Woods

Telegraph

4 days ago

I grew up in the Lake District, in a really rural area of small villages, with farms and a close-knit community.
My parents were serial house renovators. We moved house a lot and lived in building sites our whole childhood and teenage years. Weekends and holidays were spent clearing the garden, digging holes and making dens with my brothers and sisters.
I was a strange child. I loved plants and growing things. If it was my birthday, I wanted a chicken. I started to rescue ex-battery hens and used to buy ex-free-rangers for 50p each and sold the eggs to neighbours, so I was quite entrepreneurial.
I had a good idea of what hard work was. By the time I was 15, I could mix cement, plant trees, and lay foundations. And there was no question that I wanted to go to horticultural college.
When I was at secondary school, one of our art teachers started a gardening club and five or six geeky kids joined. But the kids that did it got bullied. The other kids would come along and smash things up.
Now gardening is so cool. If you're a 16-year-old, you can be out on the allotment or look after houseplants. But I was bullied for gardening. My dad was in the police, and I was into gardening – it was a double whammy.
Years later, I called my business Garden Club London in honour of all those kids who made my life hell!
I first moved to London in 2008, to Victoria Drive in Southfields, really close to Wimbledon. It was an ex-local authority house share that had been carved into more rooms than it should have been.
After a year, I moved to Putney, then Lavender Hill – all rental – then with my now-wife Lizzie to Clapham South, to Alderbrooke Road, for four or five years before moving to Folkestone. After moving house so often as kids, this feels like home.
I began working for a landscape company, in billionaires' gardens, for celebrities, or sometimes just helping someone in a rental prune back their garden.
Some of the client requests were completely bonkers. One very famous person, who had an immaculate designer garden, said the grass was the wrong shade of green. They were flying back from America and insisted their grass was sprayed green. We applied this lawn paint but it rained and the dye leached onto his limestone steps. It looked like something out of Halloween. The client came back and screamed at us. We had to bleach it clean.
We had a similar client who lived on a street in Notting Hill – a very well-known, very rude person. They had super-renovated the terrace and everything in the garden was painted white. We didn't really want to do the work – it was outdoor cleaning not gardening – but the concierge pleaded with us.
It turns out there was an old chap who lived next door whose life had been ruined by all the building work. So, he would buy blackberries from Portobello Road Market and feed them to the birds who would go and shit all over the neighbour's white garden.
Fast forward a few weeks later and it had snowed. The concierge asked us to come back and melt the snow because it had turned grey. He wanted us to make it disappear because it was not the right shade of snow.
We did our first million-pound garden last year. It was stressful, but the clients and their kids were so appreciative.
You've got two types of clients. One will text you when they know you're on holiday to tell you that a lightbulb isn't working. The other one will take a picture of a flower that has just come out in their garden and send it to you.
Our first [RHS] Chelsea garden was a step into the unknown. You have to balance keeping your business running and competing at the Olympics of gardening.
We did the floating park in Paddington on Merchant Square. That was a combination of real naivety and excitement. We knew we had to do something that had never been done before in Europe. At one stage, the headline in the Evening Standard was 'London's floating disaster'. But we got it finished. It's eight years old now, and we've won many awards for it.
I'm a real plants person. My perfect urban garden would have lots of herbs to really hack into for cooking: mint for tea and mojitos, lemon verbena for garnishing. And lots of scent – star jasmine and martagon lilies. There'd be no outdoor speakers – just bring a Bluetooth speaker out – no coloured lighting, and no inconsiderate fire pits.
The Komorebi Container Garden, designed by Garden Club London and Masa Taniguchi and sponsored by Hamptons, won gold at RHS Chelsea and has been relocated to a school rewilding project in Kent.