PROFILE ON TONY SMITH

PROFILE ON TONY SMITH & THE EASIGRASS GARDEN (URBAN PLANTAHOLIC’S KITCHEN GARDEN)

The one to look out for.  Tony Smith’s garden this year is going to be none other than outstanding: meticulous to detail, and with an acute awareness of the individual’s experience, their voyeurism into a private urban sanctuary.  And a sanctuary it is; The Plantaholic’s Kitchen is fantastical in its very concept but so truly inspirational.  

Tony, an artist with many strings to his bow, is unique in his approach to garden design, thinking beyond the realms of the impossible and truly trusting of his own imagination he delivers every time.  With less the ego of the designer, Tony is concentrated more on the development of the individual experience, of the provocation of unanswered questions in the viewer’s mind’s eye.  

He encourages an impression, an imprint into our memory that goes beyond the bounds that other garden designers strain to.  As garden designers we can easily fall into the trap of universal treatment; of box ticking, of journeys through landscape, of shelter, of exposure and wonderment; and although these are all valid site responses to consider, sometimes simplicity in thought is all that is needed.

Holding an Urban Garden’s plot at Chelsea, Tony saw the site at 7m by 5m not as somewhere to journey through but somewhere in which to be, a visual wardrobe of the inhabitant’s eye.  It is a personalized installation that develops and encourages thought and analysis and rewards with detailed textural and colour contrasts.  As an assessor or voyeur invited into this personalized space its character, its affecting being is poured into your very soul.  Poetry, water, ferns, orchids and joviality in pink play with our sensual chords, and the shady chambers soothe and massage our tired temples.  

Conscious of its very presentation at a show, Tony does not allude to its reality and actual existence more to its probable existence.  With a sneak view into the urban kitchen we see not a nutritious feast being concocted as we find elsewhere on site but a diet of orchids of colour and play, planted up directly into the very interior kitchen where this Plantaholic has taken his scented dreams into his mundane world.

Where those dreams are concocted we do know; he sits on his silky thrown in his green cave and looks out and through upside down ferns, furry ferns, miniatures, giants, with names such as Adiantum venustum and Adiantum ‘Miss Sharples’, with the water cascade drawing from him canvases of his next adventure.  

The concept and inception is undoubtedly Tony’s, with his vivid mark and style dressed through it; yet true to his very concept, to the very fanatical nature of the Plantaholic, Tony has brought onto the project the skills of the Fernatix, who know their Onoclea sensibilis from their Dicksonia sellowiana and the minutiae of the beautiful orchid.   

Collaborative in his very nature, Tony eschews the contemporary model of hierarchical company forms; with respect to the skills of others and with respect to his own individual flair his team fluctuates in accordance to the unique site demands.  Hard to manage one could argue but truer perhaps to each site, here the art form is not just a product of the artists ego manufactured at factory, but instead it is a temporal product of the relationships and dialogue built up in its very inception.    

If gardening were cool, which I believe it truly is; Tony’s cave is pretty chilled!!