10th June 2025 @ 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
The Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity, and Health, was set up as a Community Interest Company (CIC) in 2021 by Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith. The project draws on Sue’s work as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author of the best selling book, The Well Gardened Mind, which investigates the power of gardening to transform lives, as well as Tom’s horticultural expertise as an internationally renowned Landscape Architect.
The Serge Hill Project is a not-for-profit initiative based on the understanding that working with nature can radically transform people’s health and wellbeing. The aim is to foster community inclusion through gardening and other forms of creativity.
The project is based in an old orchard at Serge Hill in Hertfordshire with an educational resource centre, The Apple House, at its centre. It offers resources to local primary and secondary schools, youth organisations and mental health charities, as well as local residents who want to get involved in gardening.
The Plant Library is set out in a grid system which holds more around 1500 different varieties of mainly herbaceous plants, serving as an interactive catalogue and community of plants that can be walked through and studied from all angles. Varieties and species can be compared, and combinations of form, texture, foliage and flower can be observed and appreciated.
The Barn courtyard garden, designed by Tom Stuart- Smith was entirely redeveloped in 2007. It uses materials left over from the 2006 Daily Telegraph Chelsea show garden, which won a gold medal and was voted ‘Best in Show’.
The tanks and wall of corten steel are reminiscent of the old corrugated iron buildings that once filled this former farmyard.
Enclosed by alternating sections of hornbeam hedge and corten steel wall, a thirty metre long rill traces the garden’s boundary. Raised water tanks provide markers leading into the garden, paved with oak boarding and stone cobbles. This simple structure contrasts with richly coloured herbaceous planting. The garden is framed by two groups of Viburnum rhytidophyllum, pruned to display its angular branches against the rusted steel walls.
The day will consist of a 2 hour tour of the Barn garden and the Plant library plus a 1 hour tour of the Serge Hill project.
The cost of the tickets will be subsidised for SGDG members only; a price of £40 reduced from £65.