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Butter Wakefield needs little introduction in the world of House & Garden. Having started her career in interiors at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, she is now one of the UK's most sought-after garden designers, whose projects have featured many times on our pages. This week she is launching her first course with the brilliant Create Academy, focusing on the small gardens for which she has become known.
‘Small Garden Design’ is a fantastic course both for novice gardeners and those with more experience. Butter takes three compact garden projects of her own as a starting point, and takes viewers through each stage from concept to installation, with concise lessons covering her entire creative process. As part of the course, there are three episodes which consist of tours of the gardens themselves, and we, of course, were particularly excited for the episode featuring one of our most beloved interior designers, Rita Konig.
Butter was called in to rework Rita's garden in west London as part of the wider renovation of her home. She has created a magical courtyard space, filled with shade tolerant planting (plenty of topiary and leafy plants) along with flowers in containers, and climbing plants that adorn trellises on the walls. Below, you can see a preview of the course in which Butter and Rita talk us through the finished project.
“If I am honest, it did feel like a rather high-stakes project,” says Butter. “After all, our client was RITA KONIG, so the pressure to perform, get it right, and to deliver the garden of her dreams felt even more enormous than usual.” It was a considerable project, which also entailed the rebuilding of the entire garden wall, as Rita wanted to improve the flow of the garden by moving the gate, which is now a principal route for people entering the house. But for two such enthusiastic creatives, it was bound to be a rewarding project. “Working alongside Rita herself was an absolute joy! She is so enormously creative with a bold and vibrant use of colour and pattern, so we learned a tremendous amount from her,” continues Butter. “The layout of the garden, the big open joints and planting pockets were all her idea, which we had never really done before. She has great vision, she is fun and funny (we laughed a lot), and terribly self-effacing but she also really knew exactly what she wanted which is always hugely helpful and rather intoxicating, it was impossible not to ‘get on board’.”
The hard landscaping was one of the most crucial aspects of the project, with large stones laid throughout the space in a pleasingly irregular fashion. But what gives it real structure and character are the shrubs and topiary dotted through the space. “In many ways the garden was built somewhat back to front,” Butter explains. “We lifted the trees and structural planting into place before the hard landscaping began, which was very unusual for us. We did this so we had enough room for all the various root balls. What we didn’t want to find was that we couldn’t fit all that we wished for in - the planting took precedence over all else. We had never designed a garden this way round ever before, it was both challenging and rather exciting.”
Next up was the laying of the stones themselves. “With the help of our very patient hard landscaping team, we set out each beautiful big stone one by one," explains Butter, "making sure the paving and pitcher detail changed direction often and looked lovely from all views. We went to site every day, for many weeks to check the setting out and adjust/swap/add/subtract any stone we felt wasn’t quite right…. It was a very time-consuming process, but it was also unique, interesting, and felt somehow very bespoke.”
For the full range of insights into Butter's creative process, and how you can take away a bit of her magic for yourself, ‘Small Garden Design with Butter Wakefield’ is available from www.createacademy.com from Thursday 24 October 2024.
