Into the wild

Victorian horticulturalist and garden designer Tim Pilgrim’s new book Wild by Design is an enticing guide to a less manicured style of gardening. Mara Ripani sat down with him to chat about where his journey started and what led him to the wild side.

Mara: Tell me about the very first time that you considered doing garden work?
Tim: Oh wow! Way back! I was about to head into year 11 and I wasn’t engaged at school. I found myself wagging the first six months and almost got kicked out, and my mum said it was okay for me to leave but I couldn’t just sit on the couch, I had to either study or get a job. So as I always liked being outside I thought I’d go and study horticulture at TAFE in Bendigo where I grew up.

M: Why horticulture?
T: It was subliminal really. I’d grown up watching my grandparents work as farmers, gardeners and greenskeepers and in the turf industry, and they were always growing vegetables. I can’t remember giving it too much thought. It felt like the right path for me, so I gave it a go and haven’t looked back.

M: What were some of your first garden jobs?
T: I moved to Melbourne not long after finishing at TAFE. I secured a job in a retail plant nursery in Northcote and absolutely loved it. I was learning about customer service, answering questions from clients, developing my plant identification skills and doing propagation. I had a great colleague who was good at letting me have a go at answering people’s questions and if I didn’t know the answers I wasn’t shy to ask her, and if she didn’t know she’d say to the customer: “Why don’t you leave your number here, and we’ll do some research and get back to you?”. This was in pre-internet days of course.

My job at the nursery was casual so it was not really financially sustainable. I was keen to get my hands dirty, so I got a job on the garden crew at Scotch College. Later I secured an exchange opportunity to Wimbledon, working on their tennis court lawns.

M: When did your design work begin?
T: When I returned to Australia I called my friend Julian Blackhurst who had become head gardener at the Garden of St Erth in Blackwood, west of Melbourne, and he offered me a job. The St Erth experience was a huge education for me on organics, ornamental gardening and garden design. During my time there I would often be asked by visitors to do their gardens, and therefore I started my business TP Gardens. I started dabbling in garden design as well as garden maintenance. When the design requests started to pick up, I found myself turning people away because I wanted to be loyal to my garden maintenance customers. But then when Covid hit, some of my work dropped off.

By that stage, my wife and I had started a little market garden on our land in Guildford, near Castlemaine in Central Victoria. We were initially selling microgreens to local restaurants, but then moved to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) model when restaurants closed due to the pandemic. We started selling to about twenty families who’d come to our farm gate and hang outside around the fire pit. It was really enjoyable and really hard work. At that point we were splitting our time between different businesses: garden maintenance, the market garden and design work. Something had to give, so I hired my offsider Josey and we began to focus on design work full-time.

M: How did you develop your design style?
T: With my first garden designs it felt like I was ‘faking it till I made it’, as I had no formal experience, but I was really plant-driven and I really liked hand drawing and I naively thought, “designing gardens can’t be that hard, surely?” I quickly realised that there was a lot more to it, so I dove into books and learned about the cues I needed to take from the surrounding landscape, and then I started following designers that I really admired, looking at their work and listening to podcasts.

That led me to the work of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, a leading figure of the ‘New Perennial’ movement that emphasises naturalistic design without big hard landscaping elements. It’s very plant-driven, all about flow and function and using plants as a way to shift people’s mood and hold their focus.

So my first designs were very much about borrowing from the surrounding landscape and harnessing views, even if they were not big views. I was looking for that interesting thing in the yard or landscape beyond and working out how to frame it. I was looking for the places to be in people’s yards and identifying focal points, then building that framework into my design and filling the gaps with plants that connect to the wider landscape. I am still on that trajectory.

M: What do you find most challenging about what you do?
T: Communication was the steepest learning curve. It’s a big part of what I do, and still the most difficult part. I often need to put my psychologist hat on, because every client is different, and clear communication and responding carefully to a client’s brief is really important. These days we do a ‘reverse brief’ after a big consultation, defining the function and flow of the desired design, highlighting the points of interest, and detailing the budget.

M: Why do you champion wildness in gardens?
T: Aesthetically, the most pleasing landscapes to me are wild ones: I love that seamless connection between the garden and the surrounding landscape. I like observing movement and that’s why I use lots of grasses, and I like the way when a plant passes its perceived prime, after flowering, if you take the time to observe it you start to see a new beauty.

Decay in a garden is one of the most beautiful things you will see, as it becomes less about the garden as a showpiece and more about things like birds collecting grass as shelter or feeding on seed heads, light catching on a spider web between two dead plants, the frost settling on a plant in winter. The garden becomes a whole universe and a valuable habitat. That is why we need to change how we perceive what is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, because gardens are important in all their seasonal transformations.