Tom Stuart-Smith's vibrant yet tranquil design for the garden at The Hepworth Wakefield
Most gardens, even public ones, have a lockable gate. The garden at The Hepworth Wakefield contemporary art gallery emphatically does not. It was created in 2019, on a piece of land between a Victorian mill and the modernist concrete-grey contemporary art gallery that showcases the work of artists from the 20th century to the present day, including Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), the gallery’s namesake. Designed by renowned landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, who refreshingly describes it as ‘anti-minimalist’, it is something revolutionary – a garden free to all, open day and night.
The blank space could so easily have been developed, a tick in the economic regeneration box that all post-industrial towns need but, instead, The Hepworth Wakefield decided that what it needed was a garden. And in the long, silent lockdown months of 2020/21, it became the essence of freedom, a place to walk for the government-prescribed hour, or to sit in contemplation and watch the plants in their slow seasonal trajectory, when everything in the human world seemed mired in death and disease.
It is right an artist such as Hepworth should be celebrated by such a garden, especially as she preferred her work to be shown outside, in the changing light. Born in Wakefield, she lived through two World Wars, working throughout the strictures of rationing and constraints on liberty, and was a lifelong advocate of peace and disarmament. Her monumental sculpture Single Form stands in United Nations Plaza in New York. She absorbed the elemental landscape as a child, taking early inspiration from the weathered clints and grykes of the limestone pavement that honeycombs Yorkshire.
The gallery that bears her name and artistic vision opened in 2011 and was designed by David Chipperfield Architects, its construction reflecting Hepworth’s obsessions with form and light. But how to incorporate that and create a garden that would be as compelling as the impressive buildings that flank it and celebrate the gallery’s presiding spirit? Her 1932 figurative sculpture, Kneeling Figure, with its synthesis between the physical and the elemental worlds, was Tom’s inspiration for the garden’s overall shape: the sinuous asymmetric paths, the chunky planting of rich colours that glow under the northern sky, the way the garden holds our attention.
‘It had to have year-round interest, too, which means I had to consider how plants look when they die,’ says Tom, only half joking, as the clipped beech hedge, the outline of the trees and the seed heads of grasses and tough sculptural plants, such as yarrow (achillea), Russian sage (perovskia) and coneflower (echinacea), all have to work as hard in winter as they do for the few months they are en fête. ‘It’s not a naturalistic garden, it is more punchy and patterned than that,’ says Tom of his design. ‘I wanted all the spaces within to have as wide a range of public use as possible.’ How prescient this now seems.
‘I spent three years fundraising for the garden and, when it was just about complete, the only way I could experience it was virtually,’ recalls Olivia Colling, The Hepworth Wakefield’s director of communications and development. She remembers trying to fathom a way through the first seismic shock of March 2020 and being captivated by the small daily changes in the garden on her screen. ‘When everything else stopped, the garden came alive that spring and gave us uplifting stories to share digitally with our audiences. For local residents, many of whom don’t have gardens, it offered a hopeful space, full of life.’
In the late autumn of 2019, following the completion of its first phase, the head gardener Katy Merrington and her volunteers planted 60,000 spring bulbs. When the plants started to emerge in that unsettling, rumour-filled spring of 2020, local people enthusiastically embraced the garden. And as she worked right through those lockdown months, Katy became a confidant, social contact and protector of many who used the space daily – from the man who took his wheelchair- bound daughter there, to the teenage girl who spent an entire day reading a book under the trees and the young mother settling her restless baby. ‘If your only experience of public spaces is a council worker mowing the grass on a machine, or a load of bedding plants, seeing this garden full of sculptural seed heads, grasses and world-class art is something worth stopping for,’ says Katy. ‘Prior to the lockdown, when people passing through the garden saw me, they would say, “What are you here every day for?” They couldn’t understand what took so long. Now no one asks me that, because they’ve witnessed the garden’s slow unfolding with their own eyes and appreciate the work that goes into it. Now they say, “You weren’t here this morning when I walked through.”’
I first visited on a bone-freezing day in February 2022 and, even in the wind, rain and low light, people were sitting or standing, lost in themselves, looking at the sculptures. The pewter seed heads on the grasses and stalky perennials were almost ready to be cut down, but snowdrops and hellebores were already out and the garden felt full of spring’s explosive energy. It is not a big garden and, in the hands of a lesser designer and gardener, it could just be an out-and-through from one place to another. But something about the garden’s genius compels you to stop. One woman told me, rain lashing in her face, that she came here every day because she felt that it was her garden ‘without the weeds and hard work’. Others mentioned the jewelled colours of the summer flowers, the complexity of the autumn seed heads, like sculpture themselves, and the tranquillity of the garden. Dame Barbara would surely have recognised their delight in their new ways of seeing, and applauded the garden’s ambition.
The Hepworth Wakefield Garden, Yorkshire WF1 5JN, is free to visit and open daily: hepworthwakefield.org
