A Place to Be

Creative partnerships take many forms, but few look like that between garden designers Ros Coutts Harwood and Thomas Clarke. Ros, who retrained a decade ago, spent longer being one of the UK’s leading charity lawyers than Thomas has been alive. Thomas, by contrast, began his career as the founder of design studio, Fred Studio. Now 25, he’s the youngest designer to appear at consecutive RHS Chelsea Flower Shows, taking home four medals in the process.

“We've got sort of similar values in life,” Ros explains. “We like the outside world, we’re quite creative.” The pair, who are both based in North Yorkshire, met when Thomas’s parents invited Ros and her wife over for supper while Thomas was still a teenager. When they started talking, they realised their unlikely kismet. “We’ve just always got on,” says Tom. “We’ve now known each other for such a long time.”

“I think Tom, in many ways, is quite mature and in many ways I’m quite immature”, explains Ros. “It’s great fun. We do have a common sense of humor, which goes a long way. I have to say he's about the only person who ever laughs at my jokes.”

Aside from good humour, the pair also act as creative translators for one another. “I call him Captain Creative behind his back,” says Ros, who acts as grounding for Thomas’s plentiful ideas. While Thomas is used to delivering concepts from his own studio, working with Ros adds a new dimension. “He comes up with all these lovely concepts. When he explains the ideas to me, I think we unravel them.” In terms of the A Place to Be garden, that means getting a monorail into a 20 square metre plot.

Thomas asked Ros to join his planting team for his first RHS show garden, at Tatton Park in 2022. He then went on to make his debut at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show last year, with an escapist balcony garden design. “I came to Chelsea and saw it,” explains Ros. “The morning after, Tom phoned me up and said, ‘How do you fancy doing a garden together at Chelsea next year?’” Ros says she pretended to hesitate - “but I was just teasing. A second later I said, ‘Yes’”.

The pair have put childish delight at the heart of their inspiring design at the show: A Place to Be, for the Children with Cancer UK garden. The result is a beautiful, sweet and considered little thing - and an artful re-imagining of an RSJ beam - that acts as both an inviting jaunt for visiting children and those who will eventually use the garden when it is rehomed at the Children with Cancer UK holiday retreat in Pickering, North Yorkshire, as well as a poetic representation of what the designers want to offer those young users: A balance of control and freedom, escape and destination. Things that are rarely offered to children, let alone those facing such trying illness.

“The monorail was kind of the first starting point, and then we kind of built everything around that,” explains Thomas, from the showground where the pair are taking a break from the “surreal” experience of seeing the design they’ve been working on in paper come to life. When I ask where the concept emerged from, Thomas simply replies: “Well, it just sort of popped out of my head.” Ros laughs: “This is what happens, Alice.” A small pause, and Thomas tries to find an origin story for the idea, comes up with childhood memories of holidays to Aviemore in Scotland, and taking the ski lift there.

“The design isn’t about the future or the past, but our moments in time,” explains Ros. “That lightness of being is reflected in the design. We wanted there to be fun for children, because they are children. They may have cancer, but we don’t want that to define them: the garden just allows them to be children.”

Rather than leaving instructions for play, the pair’s design quietly invites children to explore on their own terms. The handsome oak-clad monorail cart, handmade by Thomas, can be simply operated with a lever that takes the rider to The Nest at the garden’s end. This clever space, with an exterior of steam-bent hazel and an interior of acrylic, is floored in the delicacy of ash wood tiles - also made and laid by Thomas, which acts as a perfect base for the dappled light to fall through the natural gaps in the piece’s construction. The result is a space for children to enjoy the garden while feeling hidden.

There’s also a pool, made of one piece of steel, cleverly folded - like origami - into a trough that holds suspended planters filled with mediterranean herbs. A full-throttle tap, artfully curved by a blacksmith, offers a satisfying distraction halfway down the path, should the children wish. “Children have their own imaginations and will do exactly what they want,” reasons Thomas. “They can blow the water, they can get in it if they want. We are offering up a space for them, but it’s up to the children to do the rest.”

“We thought it was about the luxury of choice,” says Ros. “That was what we wanted to give the children, given their treatment.”

Interestingly, Ros and Thomas didn’t consult with children known to the charity nor their families during their research process, nor did Children with Cancer UK set them a brief. “We toyed with the idea of involving them, but the application process for Chelsea isn’t a certainty, and we didn’t want to involve them only for it not to work out - especially if they are undergoing treatment,” explains Thomas. Instead, they drew from their own experiences of childhood. “We just had these conversations, talking about what we liked to do as children,” says Ros. “We were both quite outdoorsy people. I loved nothing better than climbing a tree to do my homework.”

When we last speak, the pair are in the throes of celebrating their work. I find Ros quietly watering the plants on the Sunday evening before press day - she later admits to sneaking a celebratory paper cup of wine with her wife, a quiet before the storm. The next day, I catch Tom demonstrating the monorail, in a fitting blue-and-white workwear jacket. I ask them if they would consider teaming up again: clearly, their incongruous partnership leads to brilliant things. “We’ve been so immersed, we haven’t even thought about it,” she says. “But I don’t see why not.”