Sophie Walker

September 2017

This new garden is designed for the public space at the entrance of the De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Holland. Making use of the bricks that paved the existing space, the garden features a series of brick ponds which host a sculpture by Anish Kapoor.  The sculpture is a twist form that is made up of a linear geometry of straight lines, which cumulatively twist to form a series of curves. The garden follows this system and engages the straight lines of the existing brick paving to rise and fall into the concave curves of the pond and the bends in the paths. 

A horn-shaped passage (also built from brick), carves downwards into the pond, forming a directive path for the visitor and providing a view of the garden from within the pond, while a single route leads through a densely planted garden space. 

The planting includes rare and new specimens collected from seed in the wild by modern-day plant hunters Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones. These rare plants are collected from all over the temperate world, (so long as they are hardy enough to grow at the Wynn-Jones' home at the foot of Mount Snowden in Wales).  Many are featured alongside their cultivated counterparts, sourced locally in Holland, and with diligence it is interesting to note the differences.  

The planting has been designed to produce a distinctly four-season garden: fully deciduous during the winter months, the garden will feature the bare branches of the trees and the seed heads of last seasons’ flowers. The first spring flowers are produced on bare stems, followed by the fresh green of new spring growth, followed by an abundance of summer flowers and foliage. The summer months give way to an array of autumn reds, oranges and yellows.

The planting is designed as a nod to the existing garden inside the museum: the plants seem to be woven together as a tapestry: the tallest mature trees linked to the smallest ground cover plants - and the garden seems to nod to this place of a vanished textile industry. 

An interactive plant list will be made available in due course.

(First three photographs copyright Peter Cox / From fourth photograph copyright Rene de Wit)

UK Holocaust Memorial Competition: Anish Kapoor with Zaha Hadid Architects & Sophie Walker 

RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2013

Two densely planted mounds slope down into a mirrored water pool.  A cut through the water forms a path to the centre of the garden.  The path shifts in size and shape at different points within the garden.  A focus on foliage and rare plants.  Two incisions are cut through the mounds.  Awarded the People's Choice Award and an RHS Silver-Gilt Medal.  

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2014

Sponsored by the Garden Museum

A pavilion structure houses a garden.  The garden is designed to be looked onto and contemplated, rather than entered.  Revealed through a single aperture, the garden is filled and tumbling with wild uncultivated rare plants, collected by Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones from seed in the wild.  Many of the plants are new to science and have never been seen before, including new genus Uocodendron whartonii.  An irrigation system emulates natural rainfall and lighting emulates sunlight.  Sponsored by The Garden Museum, this garden was awarded an RHS Silver Medal.  

A tangle of forest is contained within a concrete architecture.  A ramp navigates upwards around the inside of the building.  Moving up through the space the experience of the landscape moves from the forest floor to the tree canopy.

April 2018

Emerging from a shallow pool of water, a bank of pebbles rises in a crescent shape to form a peninsular through the water.  Carving through the centre of this perfectly square garden, this peninsula is a minimal intervention that forms a directive path through the heart of the garden.  It culminates at a single point, at which the visitor can walk no further.  The layout of the garden carefully determines the visitor experience of the garden.

This is a garden of reflection, a garden which celebrates the moon – an absent, imagined presence during most daylight hours.  The garden therefore refers to a poetic vision which ties human presence to landscape, nature and the cosmos. 

Traditionally, in many cultures, the moon is viewed not directly but as a reflection – its moonlight reflected on a sand platform, or as a reflection in water, or in a mirror. In East Asian culture, the moon is seen as a representation of the feminine. The pale ‘moon face’ of a woman is considered the highest, melancholic beauty.  When we view the moon in the garden, we are not simply viewing landscape, but the pale beauty that reflects femininity and the poetry of melancholy. 

The complete re-making of a Bahamian garden from scratch on a site that had been flattened by tarmac roads and lawn.  A difficult site on the beach which is a sand dune and has no natural soil or access to water, the area is prone to hurricanes and drought.  This garden uses exclusively native Bahamian plants and is designed in different areas: The Pool Garden (as seen below), The Ocean Dune, The Native Forest and The Inland Grasses.  The Pool Garden is gregariously planted with specimen trees and bushy shrubs all set into a tight geometric pattern and incorporates a pink sand concrete swimming pool, with dining table and deck chairs.  This garden has been made with the support, advice and guidance from the Bahamian National Trust.

A private garden located on the Sussex coast of Britain, three acres have been turned over to an ornamental grass garden. Offering a singular route through the space, the clear lines of a geometric path carve through the grasses, the only hard lines in this garden space.  The garden is dotted with specimen trees - acers, Parrotia persica, willow, ginkgo and cherry, to add to the impact of this distinctly four-season garden. This low maintenance garden is designed to be easy to manage, discreet and restful on the eye.  

Photographs copyright: Federica Sala (1 - 5), Andrew Tomes (6 - 16)

West London / Residential 

A large field-like garden for attached to an old cottage on the outskirts of London.  Blocks of ornamental grasses are planted as volumes.  A clearly defined path, raised and edged with aluminium, navigates the garden.  A focus on winter seed-heads and autumn colour.  

Kyoto, Japan 

Six gardens for a SAANA complex of houses and artists studios in Kyoto.  1. Cloud Garden: slits are cut through the wooden floor. A humidifier set beneath the floorboards generates a cloudy mist that rises into the space.  2. Forest Garden: out of a hole punctured through the courtyard floor, a rectangular block forest of forest. The plants are tightly clipped so as to maintain a rectangular volume of jungly entwined vegetation.  3. Mirror Garden: a single tree leans downwards towards a mirror pool of black water.  The tree is mature and gnarled.  The tree is shaped as a tree growing on the edge of a cliff, blown in the wind.  4. Mountain Garden: a mound rises out of the ground in the centre of the courtyard.  Mist emanates from a hole in the mound, slit at the centre. The natural mountainside terrain is dotted with clumps of wild grass and annual meadow.  5. Rice Field Garden: a square field of rice grows in the centre of the courtyard.  A mirror pool of black dyed water reflects the rice plants beneath. A mirror set into the wall behind looks down over the plants as they set seed to rice.  6. Sky Garden: a cobalt blue water pool sits square on the ground, reflected on the wall by an angled mirror. The pool is edged with aluminium.  The mirror is reflective both sides.

GROW London, Hampstead Heath, June 2016

The Incidental Garden is performed by three dancers over the course of the GROW London garden design fair, a performance in which a garden is formed.  The trace of continuous movement by three dancers along a repeated path leaves behind a mark, like a drawing which emerges in time in the wild flower meadow. 

The Incidental Garden is a celebration of what it means to make a garden – it requires playfulness and imagination.  If we come to a space -any space- believing that an ordinary act like walking can give way to something marvellous, we can make a garden.  The Incidental Garden emerges as we impact our surroundings.  The garden insists upon a transaction of exchange and Incidental Garden is a record of a continued process, a practice and an investigation.  The garden has everything to do with time, continuity and gradual change; it is proof of history as a culmination of all that was, grown over its past self.

Turkey 

Set in the Turkish countryside outside Istanbul, a spiral path rises out of the ground, revealing itself as a walled garden.  A waterfall at the centre flows outwards into a pool of water.  

Berkshire, UK

A restoration and development of an Arts and Crafts garden once owned by the Sutton family of Sutton Seeds.  Laid out originally in 1903, the garden is made up of distinct areas including the double herbaceous border, the long walk, the sunken garden, the shrubbery, the shade garden, the upper and lower lawns.  Recent introductions include rare plants and trees collected from the wild by Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones.  One such new tree includes the newly described Rhederodendron indochinensis, many of the much-praised Schefflera family, and apline Gunnera kilipiana collected in Guatemala.  

Sketches towards a garden that centres around a curtain of water that creates a veil.  There are no plants in this garden.

A courtyard garden is punctured into the top floor of a central London townhouse.  Viewed from the interior, the densely planted garden appears infinite, confusing the boundaries of what is in fact a constrained space. The ground is covered in a carpet of moss. A navigable path sets out a single route through the garden. The garden is filled with rare plants collected by plant hunters in remote areas of the temperate world, including the new genus Uocodendron whartonii, the largest specimen in cultivation anywhere, collected by Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones in Vietnam. The fresh growth of deciduous plants in Spring is followed by a lush glowing summer green, followed by autumn reds and yellows, before the leaves fall to expose bare winter branches.  

Proffessional photographs to follow.

Land swells and rises to a vertical edge.  From above, a waterfall cascades down to a pool below.  A passage through the centre of the land-bulge enables access.

Two hedges weave and ribbon in and out of one another.  Design for a set of interlinking paddocks, some for resting horses and others for riding horses.  The base hedge of Ilex or Buxus is cloud clipped at varying heights runs under a tightly pruned Carpinus over-hedge which runs steady with it's regular stems weaving in and out of the cloud hedge below.  These hedges are the only fencing to the spaces.  The gate is neatly hidden by the hedges.  

More often than not, the picturesque English parkland is an ecological desert riddled with livestock damage. Here was no exception. The question is: how do we reconsider these historic landscapes today in the context of wider environmental degradation? How do we reinvigorate these historic places with a view to biodiversity and a rich ecological habitat?

We spent many years deciding whether or not to move here full time. The land had been so degraded and the trees were desperately in need of such extensive works and new planting that the task felt enormous. But in 2020, I began to focus my energies in rehabilitating the land using animals to manage and revitalise the landscape. Today I manage a smallholding of some eighty sheep, thirty goats, alpacas, pigs, ducks, chickens, turkeys, quails, guinea fowl and peacocks. See Project Farm in main navigation for full details.