Dan Pearson on Landscape Design, Mindfulness & the Alchemy of Gardening

Summary

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Homing Podcast: Dan Pearson on Landscape Design, Mindfulness & the Alchemy of Gardening

Host: Matt Gibberd
Guest: Dan Pearson
Date: January 22, 2026

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Overview

In this evocative episode of Homing, host Matt Gibberd welcomes renowned landscape designer Dan Pearson for an in-depth conversation set in the outdoor kitchen of Dan’s Somerset home. Their discussion is an intimate journey into the meaning of home, the transformative power of nature, the personal process behind a career in landscape design, and how gardening becomes a form of mindfulness, creativity, and belonging. Pearson shares childhood memories, insights from a lifetime of working with landscapes, and offers practical wisdom for nurturing a meaningful home and garden—no matter the scale.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Formative Years and Place Attachment

• Early Home:
  Dan's childhood in Hampshire/Sussex was deeply shaped by a dilapidated Arts and Crafts house, overgrown gardens, and loving, creative parents.
  • “Mum fell in love with the building and the feeling of this house, which was rather wonderful... It was an Arts and Crafts building...the garden...was literally pressing against all the windows.” (03:08)
• Garden Restoration as Family Bond: Dan and his family spent years reclaiming the garden, unearthing orchards, greenhouses, ponds, and old trees, which gave a sense of adventure and discovery.
• First Gardening Experiences:
  Dan and his father each took borders to clear and plant, reflecting the household passion for making, creativity, and process.
  • "We did the right-hand border and dad did the left...talked about the progress of both...I had the beginnings of an art school training before I left home.” (09:04–10:47)

Gardening as Mindfulness & Emotional Well-being

• Gardening as Grounding:
  For Dan, gardening is an essential source of well-being and an antidote to life's volatility.
  • “The gardening for me is a complete mainline access route into feeling better. You're based in real time, you can't rush it and I think that's enormously grounding.” (00:03 & 58:17)
• Home as Sanctuary:
  The idea of home is deeply emotional—“a sanctuary, a place that the outside world doesn't need to exist…somewhere that’s self-defining.” (11:43)
• Mindfulness Routine:
  Dan meditates daily and finds parallels between the meditative state and the mindfulness evoked by engaging with the garden.
  • “I am pretty good actually at meditating twice a day…early in the morning and then again in the evening. And that’s been something that I’ve been doing for the last two years and have been meaning to do my whole life.” (54:31)

Creative Process & Professional Journey

• Non-traditional Path:
  Dan describes leaving school before A-levels to pursue horticulture, guided by his mother’s advice to follow his heart.
  • “Mum said to me…why don't you follow your heart and we find the best way of you doing horticulture?…As soon as she said, why don't we see…the best way of you doing something that you love, why didn't you follow your heart?” (20:33)
• Blending Art and Gardening:
  Influences from parents, art, and early mentors led to his approach where the emotional and sensory experience of place is central.
  • “There is an intellectual idea in there, but it's not necessarily the thing that you're wearing on the sleeve…it's more about the feeling of something being right in its place.” (28:24)
• Notable Clients & Creative Collaborators:
  Worked for influential names (e.g., Jony Ive, Paul Smith, Jurgen Teller) and grew his practice via creative word of mouth and television exposure.
  • “You suddenly find yourself in this place that you'd never have dreamed of being at when you were gardening at Wisley as a teenager.” (25:38)

Philosophy of Landscape and Belonging

• Place Identity & Control:
  Feeling rooted comes from physical and emotional engagement with land; Dan talks about the subtle line between controlling and collaborating with nature.
  • “It’s all about the line, I think, it’s all about...an invisible line. And sometimes it's further away and sometimes it's closer…and you can tighten the string so it's tighter, or let it go from year to year.” (45:42)
  • Visual metaphor: How their 20-acre property is managed like the expanding ripples from a stone dropped in water (47:57).
• Spirituality of Place:
  Describes his work as inviting a sense of serenity, subtle sensuality, and even spirituality.
  • “People often say when they come into the places, they've been taken somewhere…there's a spiritual quality to the places because you're being rooted in something that's often quite subliminal, something you don't quite understand, but is essential and sensual...” (30:58)

Human Connection, Solitude & Sharing

• Solitude vs. Loneliness:
  Gardening as chosen solitude rather than loneliness—“you choose to be alone when you’re gardening, but maybe solitary is the better word” (59:39).
• Gardening as Social Bridge:
  Best conversations often happen side by side in the garden; this is mirrored in Maggie’s Centres, where green spaces facilitate comfort and dialogue.
  • “As soon as men started working together in the garden, that's when the conversations happened.” (59:50)

Practical Wisdom & Advice

• For Gardeners at Any Scale:
  • Don’t rush; take time to observe and learn from your environment (65:59).
  • Start with what you have—windowsills, indoor plants, allotments—all can nurture attachment and creativity.
  • Allow kids the freedom to make a mess in nature and experiment.
  • It’s okay to make mistakes; learning comes from doing.

Memorable Anecdotes & Quotes

• On Emotional Attachment to Home:
  • “I think you’re extremely lucky in this life if you’re able to be in a stable environment with your kids and that provided that place.” (12:04)
• On Social Sensitivity & Differentness:
  • “I felt like I was affected by things deeply…There was an unknown element about the natural world that there wasn't with people. People are more scary.” (33:31)
• On the Alchemy of Gardening:
  • “I think I just understood that there was an alchemy in the process…if you allowed yourself to be part of the alchemy…it’s about nurturing…it’s about day-to-day observation…” (16:52)
• On Home as a Hub:
  • “The house is the hub and it's a really nice feeling…all these lines are our views and places we go to out from the house. But the house is where all the lines…the stories you bring back, that's where they're all revealed.” (43:42)
• On Nature and City:
  • “It was exhausting to be made to feel small by a man-made thing. That's what I've loved about Japan so much…you're often encouraged to be in those intimate places. The small is beautiful." (35:34)
• Closing Reflection:
  • “It’s a refuge, it’s an oasis, it’s an opportunity, it’s a luxury, it’s a safe place. It’s somewhere we can share with other people.” (64:36)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• [03:08] — Dan’s description of his childhood home and the transformative effect of restoring the garden.
• [07:57] — On the importance of process over results in caring for a place.
• [16:52] — The "alchemy" of gardening and nurturing as a reciprocal act.
• [20:33] — Turning point: choosing horticulture over conventional education.
• [28:24] — The evolution of his work with prominent clients and maintaining creative authenticity.
• [30:58 – 32:26] — Defining the Dan Pearson garden: language, spirituality, and atmosphere.
• [43:42] — How the house acts as a central hub; connection between landscape and dwelling.
• [45:42 – 47:57] — Managing the line between control and wildness in land stewardship.
• [54:31–57:27] — Establishing and reflecting on a daily meditation practice.
• [59:39] — On gardening as mindful solitude (not loneliness).
• [65:59] — Practical advice for new gardeners: start small, observe, and be unafraid of mistakes.

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Notable Quotes (with Attribution & Timestamps)

• “The gardening for me is a complete mainline access route into feeling better. You're based in real time, you can't rush it and I think that's enormously grounding.”
  —Dan Pearson, (00:03, 58:17)

• “I think you’re extremely lucky in this life if you’re able to be in a stable environment when you're kids and that provided that place.”
  —Dan Pearson, (12:04)

• “There is a spiritual quality to the places because you're being rooted in something that's often quite subliminal, something you don't quite understand, but is essential and sensual and important in some way.”
  —Dan Pearson, (30:58)

• “It was exhausting to be made to feel small by a man-made thing. That's what I've loved about Japan...the small is beautiful.”
  —Dan Pearson, (35:34)

• “It’s a refuge, it’s an oasis, it’s an opportunity, it’s a luxury, it’s a safe place. It’s somewhere we can share with other people...”
  —Dan Pearson, (64:36)

• “Don’t rush it. Take time to look. I think that’s the key thing.”
  —Dan Pearson, (65:59)

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Conclusion

This episode is a rich meditation on the interwoven themes of home, creativity, nature, and identity. Dan Pearson’s reflections invite listeners to see their personal environments—no matter how grand or humble—as living canvases enlivened by attentive care, presence, and gentle experimentation. Through stories, practical advice, and deep emotional honesty, this conversation offers profound inspiration for anyone looking to cultivate a home that roots and restores them.

Transcript

[Dan Pearson]

I felt like I was affected by things deeply. The world that I made for myself was a safe place in a way. There was an unknown element about the natural world that there wasn't with people. People are more scary. The gardening for me is a complete mainline access route into feeling better. You're based in real time, you can't rush it and I think that's enormously grounding. You know, it's somewhere that's self defining and somewhere that I loved.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Why does it make you emotional talking about that?

[Dan Pearson]

I think you're extremely lucky in this life if you're able to be in a stable environment with your kids and that provided that place.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Hello and welcome to Homing. My name's Matt Gibbard. As a parent, I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but I am particularly excited about sharing this episode. Today's guest is the wise and wonderful landscape designer, Dan Pearson. Over the course of a 40 year career, Dan's designed everything from a forest garden in Japan to private gardens for the likes of Jony I've, Paul Smith and Jurgen Teller. Together with his partner Hugh Morgan, he also produces Dig Delve, an influential online journal documenting what they're planting, harvesting and cooking in their own garden in Somerset. I recorded this conversation with Dan in their outdoor kitchen where they prepare and eat food all year round, whatever the weather coming in over freezing hill. He also took me on a tour of his incredible garden and Japanese inspired studio which is available to Homing members on Patreon. Spending time with Dan, it becomes clear that working with the landscape isn't just his profession, it's how he understands himself and the world around him. For the past 15 years, he's been gently shaping the land around his home and slowly putting down routes of his own. This is a conversation about living in rhythm with nature and about learning to belong to a landscape rather than trying to master it. I hope you enjoy listening.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Hi Dan, thanks for being on the podcast. So, starting at the beginning, where did you spend your earliest years? Because I've read that you, you lived in an arts and crafts cottage in sort of Hampshire, Sussex way. But what age were you there from? And, and did you have a place before that?

[Dan Pearson]

Yes, we were brought up in. In Hampshire. Yeah, Hampshire Sussex border. And mum and dad had a house, Victorian house, in a sort of small group of houses in some woodland outside the village. And there was an old lady called Miss Joy who lived along the lane behind an enormous hedge which had sprawled into the lane. And all you could see of the house was A chimney with a tree growing out of it. There was a hole in the hedge that she would come out of in the autumn with windfall apples which she'd leave on people's doorsteps.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And.

[Dan Pearson]

And she was very wayward looking and she made her own hats and seemed very, very old to, you know, somebody under 10. And when Ms. Joy, eventually, she had a series of strokes and Mum befriended the executor, who was a neighbor. And when Ms. Joy eventually died, Mum went in to see what was behind the hedge, this hole in the hedge. And Mum had been brought up in vicarages during, you know, the war time. And so she'd been brought up in big buildings, rather wonderful buildings, cold, big houses with histories, because her dad was a vicar. So she's got this interest in architecture. She's always been interested. And she found this building which Ms. Joy had been living in since the early 1900s, and it was an acre of garden that had overwhelmed her and was literally pressing against all the windows. And there was rat holes under every single door and vegetation got in through the windows and underneath the skirting boards and was wrapped around the furniture in the house. And Mum fell in love with the building and the feeling of this house, which was rather wonderful. It was an Arts and Crafts building a builder had built, obviously, because he was interested in the era. So it wasn't like a Latin standard, but it had many of those beautiful details and aesthetics, but built by a builder, so it was still really interesting, but very, very dilapidated. And Mum and Dad bought it. When Mum took her mother to see it, her mother cried because it was so overwhelming. And as children it was terrifying. My brother and I were terrified of it, in a good way. You know, it was like. It was scary. It had corridors and, you know, darkness and vegetation again, as I was saying, pressed up against the windows. And we spent the next. Until I left home at 17, the next kind of, I suppose, what, seven or eight years, clearing this garden to find this rather wonderful garden underneath the undergrowth. And Mum and Dad then spent all their spare time, they were both teaching, doing this house up by themselves. So that became a life project. So home there was very, very important. We didn't really go on family holidays because there's always an adventure of discovering something new in the garden. Like we discovered an orchard, we discovered an old greenhouse at the bottom. Everything on a small scale. It wasn't grand. We discovered a pond under the undergrowth and there were amazing old trees which were all falling down. And it was a very, very wonderful and Strong, potent atmosphere. And the building had. In Ms. Joy's room, which was. She lived in two rooms downstairs. The kitchen was piled high with copies of the Sunday Times, literally almost touching the ceiling. And she had these little corridors in the kitchen between sight, Ms. Havisham's. There were swags of cobwebs from the corners of the room to the light fittings in the middle. The curtains had rotted up from the floor. There were dust sheets over all the furniture in the rooms that weren't being used. She used two rooms, and underneath each piece of furniture there was a perfect imprint of dust where the woodworm had been eating away at the furniture. So it was kind of a wonderful place. And so we were brought up. I moved into this house that had this incredibly strong identity and sense of place. And in clearing the garden, which had an equally strong identity and sense of place, you know, I fell in love with this whole idea of the natural world. Really what happens to a place when it's taken over by nature and people are overwhelmed? You know, it's been a constant kind of dialogue in my work of that teetering point between things being care maintained and nature having the upper hand. You know, that naturalistic feeling that's so wonderful. And it's something I revisit all the time. And interestingly, I think because the home was so important to us as a family there, and because I've always gardened, I like to be rooted in one place. Place or rooted in a place by being engaged with it and doing, rather than somebody else doing it or not getting your hands dirty.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So you think that actually getting your hands in the soil connects you to that plot of land somehow.

[Dan Pearson]

So much of what I think caring for a piece of land or a garden is about is the process. It's the process. It's not necessarily the end result. It's about being in the moment and in the process of making that place something or nurturing a place, making a place better for it, being loved in some way or seen. So that's been key, I think, to the way that I've approached everything since moving there. It was absolutely pivotal experience for my brother and me. He was younger than me and had different experiences as a result. But I think it really formed the way that I. That world seemed enormous. It was only an acre, but it seemed absolutely enormous. And we had camps inside overgrown hedges that nobody knew about that were worlds in themselves. And it was a whole environment. That was the thing that I loved about it. It was an environment.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And your parents gave you a plot, didn't they? I think I read and in fact I think I read that your dad would come and give you crits on what you'd planted.

[Dan Pearson]

Yes. Yeah. Ye. Well, because I was mad gardener, mad gardening. I was more than happy to be quite isolated as a child. I think I didn't really need. I did have friends, but I didn't need them in the same way that my brother did for company. And I took over this. We discovered two long borders that led down to an orchard that was, you know, that were completely enveloped in brambles. And I did the right hand border and dad did the left hand border. And we kind of met in the middle, in the evenings and talked about the progress of both. And my dad taught fine art, my mum taught fashion and textiles. So we were in a environment, Luke and I, my brother and I, where process and making and you know, talking about that process or engaging with it, I think it was quite key and important. So that crit that I would have from dad on a regular basis about color and form and texture and he was an amateur gardener. Both Mum and dad were quite good at amateur gardeners. She grew the vegetables, he grew the flowers. He was really interested in color. I learned about how to look at things, I think, through those evening sessions of talking about the work that we'd been doing during the day. And in a way, I had the beginnings of an art school training before I left home. You know, it was really probably. It was a very privileged thing to be part of, to have caring parents who thought about how to get the best out of everything.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah. Because your brother Luke has a design studio that doesn't need Pierce and Lloyd.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Which I'm sure some people will know. So that's kind of interesting. You both ended up pursuing creative avenues.

[Dan Pearson]

And endeavors and things that are the product of a making process.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah, right.

[Dan Pearson]

You know, so it was. It was definitely a making household. You know, Mum was always at her sewing machine and dad was painting and it was. We were very lucky, you know, I realize now we were very lucky to have. And mum and dad had both quite separate lives within the house doing their different things and we were all doing our own projects.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Okay.

[Dan Pearson]

So in a way, both Luke and I, we are both very project driven people as well. You know, we love to have a project and get our teeth stuck into something that's interesting.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So that's instilled that.

[Dan Pearson]

I think so at that early age for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

If you think about that house, what's the emotion that you Think of.

[Dan Pearson]

A sanctuary, a place that the outside world doesn't need to exist. You know, it's somewhere that's self. Self defining.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

And somewhere that I loved. Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Why does it make you emotional talking about that? Out of interest?

[Dan Pearson]

I think you're. I think you're extremely lucky in this life if you're able to be in a stable environment when you're kids and that provided that place. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So important.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

There's this lovely quote that I read of you, Dan, which is that I felt like a freak because all my friends were ladies in their 60s and 70s. It's really lovely. But tell us about that. What does that mean?

[Dan Pearson]

Well, my friends are still ladies in their 60s and 70s. I'm catching up. But then I did feel a bit unusual at school because gardening was the domain of older people mostly.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And is it. I mean, just to dwell on that a sec. So you felt unusual at school? Did everyone just sort of think that you were a bit odd?

[Dan Pearson]

Nobody didn't. Nobody knew.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Nobody knew about the garden.

[Dan Pearson]

And I had this really great friend, Peter, who was from a very wayward family who came to live in the house opposite. And they were awayward in the best possible way. They were Australian and they'd come over to. It was 70s, mid-70s, and they'd come over to be part of a fellowship, a commune in the local village. So it was slight hippie, really, I guess. And there were four kids and they had never worn shoes before. So they came from Australia and they spent the first winter because their feet had so wide, because they'd never worn shoes, in plimsolls with these rotting plimsolls, remember really distinctly. But there was a real freedom to that. Those kids that we didn't have at school in our English ways. And I just. I loved hanging out with them. And we had some wild times, you know, in the woods and climbing trees and doing things that we shouldn't have done that our parents wouldn't have allowed us to do, you know, and that was great. So it's not like I didn't have friends that were my age, but the kids at school, I suppose a lot of them were farming community kids or it was the beginning of commuter belt because it was Hampshire. I just never really felt like I fitted in with the majority of the people at school. And I felt more comfortable, I think, with my Australian friends who were outside the loop anyway, or with my older gardening friends. So I had two older women who were, yes, in the 60s and 70s, one of whom had A very, very good garden in the village that I went to garden for on Saturdays. Mrs. Pumphrey.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

This is Mrs. Pumphrey at Grayton Mill Gardens.

[Dan Pearson]

Yes. And then Geraldine Noyes, who was our immediate neighbour, who was a retired history teacher from St. Paul's School of Girls in London. And she was in a wonderful spirit. She'd fire watched on St. Paul's in the war, you know, she was a fearless person and she used to go off every summer in her Morris Minor with her friend Enid, and they would collect plants from the Pyrenees and mountains in Europe, you know, and bring them back and bring these plants to life for me. So she'd unwrap these plants. I'd meet her when she came back. So I'd look after her garden while she was gone, do her watering and things. And she'd unwrap these things from foreign newspapers, you know, from the back of her boot of her car and tell me where these things were growing, what they'd been grown with and what the environment was like they'd grown in. And it was all about nature connection. And then her garden was completely wild and woolly and she was just as much of a naturalist as she was a gardener. So I had that kind of wild thing reinforced in a different way. So there was the hill cottage wild environment that we were living in. And then she was our nearby neighbour who let me go into her garden whenever I wanted. It was completely open access and she made this connection really between the things that shared the garden with you and the plants. So there was the whole nature part of it was really a big part of it. And then Mrs. P down in the village was just a really brilliant gardener and a great colorist and a fantastic plants person. And she had little nurseries. So she taught me how to grow plants that she then sold from the nursery. And so I really got a very balanced horticultural training in a way from those two women and then mum and dad of course, who were interested in the garden, but not gardening wasn't their first thing.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

How do you explain why you were so obsessed with it at such a young age?

[Dan Pearson]

I think I just understood that there was an alchemy in the process. And if you allowed yourself to be part of the alchemy, it was. Well, for a start, it's kind of magic, but it's not magic because it's about inputs and it's about caring for something and nurturing something. So once you understand that, it's about the nurturing, it's about the day to day observation it's about noticing why something might be doing well or not and then adjusting your behavior around that to make it do better. I think that became a very key thing for me in terms of there was a reciprocity in it, which is contagious, actually. So very early on, it just became something I wanted to do more of.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So I gather that you dropped out of doing your A levels and thought, I just want to go and do gardening. Right.

[Dan Pearson]

I kind of fell out of love with school quite early on.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

You're not alone in that. Tell us about that. Why is that?

[Dan Pearson]

Well, I was quite good at certain subjects, so I was good at the arts. I was good at English. I had a really, really wonderful English teacher, another woman in her 60s called Mrs. Wiggins, Joan Wiggins, who opened up this connection for me between writing and gardening. So she could see that I was very myopic and I wasn't studying and I was just gardening. And she showed me the work of Christopher Lloyd and various people who were writing well about gardens. And it just opened up a whole world for me in terms of pinning down thoughts through words. And I started to really love English. And then we moved schools when I was 13 and left Mrs. Wiggins behind. I just got lost in a big school, and I learned quite quickly that I could just slip through the cracks. So I did the subjects that I loved and was good at, and then I simply stopped going to the ones that I wasn't. And somehow I didn't get pulled up for not going to maths.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

You just wouldn't attend.

[Dan Pearson]

I just stopped attending because I was doing very well at geography at one point. And I remember my maths teacher, because I was so bad at maths because I got the fear of maths somewhere I missed a building block and I just got the fear. And then I stopped concentrating, and then I was out of the loop. I was behind everybody else and I couldn't catch up because I had the fear. And I remember my math teacher saying to me, did you do that work for your course study for your O level or your pre. Whatever it was, exams? And I remember thinking, you shouldn't be saying this to me, you know, because of course I did that work and you obviously just written me off completely. And I remember thinking, I'm not coming to the class again. So I didn't. And so I never got my O levels and maths, and I kind of got through. And I've managed as an adult. It's not been a major problem. But it was nice to feel that you could slip through the cracks without having to be a major rebel. So there were friends of mine at school who were rebellious and getting into trouble. And I didn't get into trouble, I just slipped through the cracks, you know. So it was quite interesting learning that quite early on. And I think that's maybe allowed me to approach my work in a slightly different way as an adult, in a slightly more maverick way, maybe.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

What do you mean by that?

[Dan Pearson]

There was this, like, epiphany moment where I was preparing to go to art college, because that was a strength and I was good at it. And Mum said to me, because I was so obsessed by the gardening, why don't you follow your heart and we find the best way of you doing horticulture? And at that point, horticulture in the early 80s, late 70s, very early 80s, it was then you didn't really go into horticulture, you could go and study sciences or the more scientific side, that is ecology or landscape architecture. But it was. There was a big divorce between those subjects and horticulture. And horticulture was mostly for people who weren't very good at school, who could learn a trade. But I didn't see that there was anything wrong in that. And as soon as she said, why don't we see the best way, find the best way of you doing something that you love, why didn't you follow your heart? You always come back to the art, which was such a good piece of advice. So I put a portfolio together because Mum and Dad help students put portfolios together. I took it to Wisley and they said, did you do this? Because they hadn't ever seen anybody at the interview take a portfolio or. That's what they told me, just to.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Explain to people, what is Wisley to those who don't know?

[Dan Pearson]

Well, sorry, Wisley is the Royal Horticultural Society's kind of flagship garden in Surrey. And at that point they had an apprenticeship for students between 17 and 19, which is why I needed to leave school before my A levels to study horticulture. And it was basically, you worked in the garden, you did course studies on a Wednesday and then you. You did studies in the evening to supplement the work that you did in the garden. So for them, it was like youthful labour in the garden. They gave you some teaching in turn. It was like a proper apprenticeship. And I was like this major sponge. I just went there and just absolutely loved the learning and the gardening and being taught by people who spent lifetimes learning about specific aspects of horticulture. And for me, I was really ready to leave school. You know, I just didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be in that confined environment. It wasn't the right place for me at that time. And Wisley ended up being a great stepping stone to move on to other things. But just in terms of the maverick thing, when I finished Wisley, I looked into doing landscape architecture. And I could have done that, but it felt very dry because at that point there was less of a crossover into the world of the arts. So it was very much more about architecture outside. And I knew that I wanted to include the plants and I knew I wanted to make places with plants. I didn't want to just garden plants, I wanted to make places with plants. So I then went, I thought, okay, well, I'll study more and I'll find more about plants. So I can basically work anywhere I want to with plants. Because I'd become interested in travel by that point and seeing plants in the wild, which was that connection back to Ms. Noyes, Geraldine Noyes, going out to look at plants in the wild. So I then got a place. I spent a year at Edinburgh Botanics and I met a whole load of people, wonderful people, who became my first gardening friends, really. We went out to look at plants in the wild on the west coast and wild west coast gardens. And then we went on, we got a small scholarship to visit the mountains in northern Spain. And everything opened up for me then and I came back down to Kew for three years, did a course there, which was like a degree course really, in horticulture. And meanwhile, I'd already started making a garden for a friend of mom, son she worked with. And so I sort of started the process of garden making and applying horticulture to making places with plants. So I didn't study landscape architecture. I found a way into making landscapes and through work. Now we employ. I've got a wonderful team of people, most of whom are landscape architects. So they've got the skills I haven't. I've got stronger skills in horticulture that they might not have through just studying the landscape architecture. And we're making plant led environments. Yep. And working with some really interesting people. So there's crossover into the art world, this crossover into the interesting architectural word world, you know, institutions that are doing interesting things and, you know, you suddenly find yourself in this place that you'd never have dreamed of being at when you were gardening at Wisley as a teenager.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Well, it is phenomenal, isn't It.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

I mean, I can name drop on your behalf, but people like Paul Smith and Jony I've. And Jurgen Teller and all these people that you've made gardens with and for, it's just an extraordinary group of other creatives.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

How do you put your finger on.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Why other creatives are drawn to your work?

[Dan Pearson]

I think it's an interesting question. The first person I started working for to make a garden for age 17, when I was at Wisley 18 hours, was a wonderful woman called Frances Mossman, who's now become a really great friend. And she was teaching. She'd set up next in the early 80s, and so she was working in the commercial side of fashion, but she has always had interesting connections to other people in the more creative side of a commercial world of fashion. And. And she was friends with a woman called Priscilla Coluccio, whose husband is a man called Antonio Coluccio. She was Terence Comrade's sister. I made a garden for her. So when I started working with Francis, she said, there's somebody else I think you should work for. So when I left Kew, I set up my own business, basically working out the back of a yellow van and by myself. And I went to make a garden for Priscilla Coluccio, who was. She was the main buyer for the Comrade shop at that point. And being Terence's sister, you know, they were a creative family. So she taught me how to look at things in a very particular way, in terms of everything being connected and how to look at the essence of things. And she embedded that process of. So making the garden for her was an enormous education. Making the garden from Frances was an education because she was a textile person. So we'd create the garden looking at the plants with form, texture, color, all those things that you'd. If you were talking about a textile, you'd go through the same, like, what's the weave, what's the feel, what's, you know, all those same languages come into how we were looking at the way the garden was being made. So I had the art school training. I never got through working with these talented people again, often women. Then I ended up working with Terence on a big book, Terence Command. And then you suddenly find yourself in a different world. And then I was picked up because I was of a certain age, in my late 20s, and up and out there and doing things with quite an interesting crowd of people. I got picked up by TV and. And then I think you then become very visible very quickly or too quickly, and I think that's how people start to See what you're made of.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

So I think initially those. It was by word of mouth through a very interesting little tribe of people. And then the TV people picked up on that. And then you're suddenly out there in tv, and then what you find is that you lose complete control of it, and then you have to make your life smaller again. So during the time that I was doing tv, I worked on the first makeover programs. I loved it because it wasn't solitary. I was working with a very interesting production company, and we were making something quite fast, so you could turn ideas over really quickly. But TV is a hungry beast, and they don't look at you as an individual. They look at you as a product. So I just got sapped of all my creative energies. You know, it's like a hungry, hungry thing. And they want more, and they want more, and they want more. And you're projected into a world which isn't really anything about you as a person. So the Dan that was out there on TV is not the Dan that I feel I am. And the. There was this big displacement thing that happened that ended up with me getting completely overloaded and having a crisis at age 32 and thinking, okay, I can't do any of that. I've got to go back to concentrating on what I want to do. So I made a big stop, a big full stop, and then put my energy back into my safe world, which is the garden and making gardens and environments. So going back into that world of being on the ground with your feet rooted again, rather than out there with no control. So it's been. That's been quite an interesting part of it. But I think that now we're working with people that come to me for a particular thing that I'm doing, you know, And I think I was very lucky quite early on to be able to communicate what that was and to establish a kind of feeling around what I do, which is that the work is about an opportunity to get under the skin of things and make a place that might be more about a feeling than an intellectual idea, but it does something to you because it's taking you somewhere. And there is an intellectual idea in there, but it's not necessarily the thing that you're wearing on the sleeve. It's more about the feeling of something being right in its place. And there's a quietness about that which demands that you need to be in a quiet place to be able to do it properly.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Is there such a thing as a Dan Pearson style of garden? If you could put your finger on it. What would you call it?

[Dan Pearson]

I think there's a language. Yeah, there's definitely a language which is adaptable, as language is to be something that is more animated or quieter or sometimes more visible, sometimes less visible. But there's always a. People often say when they come into the places, they've been taken somewhere. And I think that ability to recalibrate people and take them somewhere that feels. People also use. It's not a term I use freely because it. It can sound wrong. But there's a spiritual quality to the places because you're being rooted in something that's often quite subliminal, something you don't quite understand, but is essential and sensual and important in some way. You might not understand it, but it makes you feel better. It's quite simple in some ways, and you can't quite put your finger on it. So in a way, it's more about a feeling. And there's a softness about the aesthetic, which I think you could say this is what the gardens look like. They might have frayed edges. They're not hard, they're soft, they're informal, they're not formal, they're mutable. They're something that can change according to the light. You know, they're quiet places, really, that allow other things to happen.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

You use the word spiritual there. Just spending a bit of time with you this morning, you come across as someone that's. I don't know if that's the right word you'd apply for yourself, but sensitive maybe is a word. Do you just come out that way? Do you see what I mean? Or has. As you go through life, working with the landscape, does it make you more sensitive to it? I mean, I'm kind of interested in whether someone who's as immersed in landscape as you are is born or they're. They're sort of made.

[Dan Pearson]

I think you're. I think you're. I think I always did feel. I mean, we all feel different to some degree, don't we? I'm sure all of us could say, but I felt different at some point.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

I don't think everyone does, actually, but go on, tell me why you felt different.

[Dan Pearson]

I just felt like. I think that, quote, you be feeling like a freak. I think maybe the word's too strong. I used it. But just feeling like you don't fit in, I think is possibly because you're observing things, you're affected by things.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yes, exactly right.

[Dan Pearson]

I felt like I was affected by things deeply. And I think the world that I Made for myself was a safe place that allowed things to be more. In a way there was an unknown element about the natural world that there wasn't with people. People are more scary somehow. And the natural world was something that if you understood it became more known, you know, it wasn't as volatile. I think people can be complicated and volatile and wonderful because of that. But it's when you're forced into environment that is school at an early, early point, it's volatile. You've got no control over your. A gang, you know, in school who for whatever reason might pick on another gang or a group or one person. And because people didn't understand me, you know, I did get picked on and it wasn't. I dealt with it because I'm also quite enterprising and I slipped through the cracks. You know, I found a way of dealing with it that meant I didn't get horribly bullied or anything for being different. But I ended up hanging out with the people that were different at school and you know, and we kind of. At the end of the day you ended up being. You're hanging out with the cool kids actually or a group of who you now realize were. You didn't know it then.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

That's so interesting to me. When I spoke to Nigel Slater on the podcast, he talked about his sensitivity to certain environments which I must admit I really identified with. But he talked about sometimes he gets a feeling of falling. He talks about how he finds staircases and you know, things like that quite difficult to deal with, especially as he moves into later life. I just wondered if for you, your sensitivity, does it manifest itself anywhere in the built environment in particular that you can put your finger on. Are there certain spaces that you feel are quite difficult in everyday life or.

[Dan Pearson]

Oh, I've just come back from Paris and I've been going to Paris for many years because I went to Paris with mum with her students at the Pret a porter during my teenage years. And she just let me roam in Paris on my own. And I remember this feeling of exhaustion and I've just literally yesterday come back feeling that same sense of exhaustion because the city planning there is so enormous, inhumanly enormous. And it was designed to be like that because it was the big gesture. It's opulence and you know, views that go for miles in one straight line. And it's exhausting to be made to feel small by a man made thing. That's what I've loved about Japan so much is that you're often encouraged to be in those Intimate places. And the small is beautiful. It can be beautiful. It's not always about the big gesture which man feels they need to make. So I think in a way, those places that are. They can be wonderful, like New York, Manhattan, you know, those enormously tall buildings and hard landscape, you know, it can be incredibly exciting and wonderful. But I always gravitate to, if I'm in New York, I always gravitate to the Lower east side, where the buildings are smaller and the streets are not straight. You know, you're not on a grid anymore. And there's an informality to those spaces. And it's about that human grain breaking down and feeling more like it's been naturally colonized than there being an organized system. So I can see how interesting that Parisian landscape is, but it makes me feel tired and I feel much more naturally drawn to things which have evolved organically over a time or a conversation, which is not linear, it's divergent. And I think those are the ways that make me feel more comfortable. And the ways that are about us dominating landscape are less comfortable.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yes, I mean, I'm thinking about the Savannah hypothesis here when you're talking. But of course, if we were raised on the Savannah, it's clear that we must be drawn to that kind of combination of legibility and mystery, I think. And if we think about the landscape you've got behind me here, it's exactly that in that you can, you know, we're perched quite high, so you have a vantage point. But also the way the hills interlock mean that there's also mystery because you don't quite know what's around the corner exactly. And actually, in Manhattan or Paris, it's sort of the definition of a breakdown somehow, because it's just all so grid like.

[Dan Pearson]

Right.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And that's kind of what you're describing, I think.

[Dan Pearson]

And I think here it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's that whole idea of prospect and refuge. So they think that early settlers, you know, they often did find somewhere that was on a hill with some water below and some tree cover near that, you know, for the animals and to come down to the water so they could see literally what their hunting grounds were, and they'd have the hill behind them so they, you know, were safe. And interestingly, this place here is exactly that. You know, we're literally built into the hill. So the house is built into the hill at the back. And then We've got this 180 degree view at the front where we can see everything. And it Makes me feel incredibly comfortable also, because it's not too big. So we can imagine walking to the hill and I do opposite, you know, but as you. Exactly as you say. But you don't know quite what's around the corner. So there is mystery and magic here, but there's also prospect, and that's one of the great things. And I think we can. The house becomes part of the safe place. That's a counterpoint to that prospect and the big skies and the big view. So for me, that's kind of wonderful. I was brought up in a woodland, you know, and I. We always used to. Dad used to take us cycling because it was lovely landscape. And so we'd go cycling in the evenings and we were very close to the South Downs and that feeling of coming out of the woods and then the South Downs were there, and all their nakedness, you know, with all their soft, billowy outlines, and that was always a really wonderful part of popping out of the woods. And there they were, you know, this big landscape where I could travel. So that combination of the two things, I think has always been interesting to me.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So lovely. So let's move on to talking about this house, then. Just tell me. I mean, you kindly walked me around earlier and that tour we'll make available on Patreon. But for those that are just listening to this, how long have you been here and what was here when you got here?

[Dan Pearson]

We've been here now for 15 years. It's amazing how fast time flies. And we were 12 years before in Peckham, and I was drawn to this place, really, because at the point which we arrived, it was just a little stone house on the hill, two up, two down, without buildings, two barns, small barn that we've now converted into a living space, and then a big barn which is for the use for the land. We've got 20 acres. And what we liked about it, I think, was that it was authentically itself. It wasn't. Hadn't been done up. It had been done up, but very badly in a very makeshift way in the 80s. And it was charmless enough to not worry about it. And I think that that allowed us this feeling of being able to get our teeth into something that we can make our own. You could see there were some good bones here. And friends of ours, when we first arrived, one set of friends came and said they looked at it. And one friend was. You could see he was daunted. And he said, well, this is a life project. And I said back to him, yes, isn't it because for me it was like the prospect of the life project and for him it was like there was so much to do that he could see. And we didn't see the stuff, all the stuff that needed doing because it needed doing everywhere. We just saw the prospect. And then another friend said he felt it was bleak.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

That's kind.

[Dan Pearson]

Well, I just think that's interesting. I mean he just talking about place he was brought up in the new forest, all right, so in proper woodland and that was his environment. And this is not that place, you know. And I could so see where that comment came from because this is about air and light and this is my view of the downs. You know, it's just a different version of that and the feeling of being in touch with the elements and being able to see the elements coming down the valley and then you see a storm brewing at one end and then within seconds it's on you and then it's gone again. You know that wonderful feeling of it's almost like being by the sea but you're not. And I think that the land offers you so much more for being all around you. And the building in a way is like, it's like a little observation hut. It's like a lens through which the landscape then becomes honed. You really do get this feeling of like if you were drawing a little diagram with all the lines intersecting in the middle like a starburst. And then predominantly the lines being predominantly out to the front and the sides, you know, that's the point where all the lines cross. In the middle is the house. And then all these lines are our views and places we go to out from the house. But the house is where all the lines so the stories you bring back, that's where they're all revealed. So in a way the house is the hub and it's a really nice feeling that it being like a point where everything comes together.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

A quick interlude to remind you that Homing members on Patreon also get access to a walk around tour with Dan. He shows me his outdoor kitchen. We wander down through his beautifully wild garden and we finish with a snoop around the modern guest house he's built, which is inspired by the principles of Japanese architecture. You'll find it at patreon.com homingwithmat you.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Know when you're sitting in a place and you've got your back to a wall or indeed your back to a room, it's called the command position. Right in the sense that you can see everything that's in front of you. And in theory, you can see any threats that might be coming, which is quite a sort of visceral, ancient thing. It strikes me that this house is sort of the embodiment of that idea. You know, you're nestled in the hill and you've got the ultimate prospect. Is it somehow about control for you? Because that was the word that came into my head as you were talking. Is it something about being able to control your environment and feel comfortable with what's out there?

[Dan Pearson]

Oh, I think so.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

I think so. And I think also the fact that this is. It's small, you know, you don't feel that the house is out of control, or there are empty rooms that aren't being used or, you know, the house we were brought up in as kids had was only five bedrooms, but it was kind of rambling and there were long, dark corridors and rooms at the end with nobody in them. And you didn't know quite who was in the room. You know, you knew there was nobody in them, but it was this element of scariness and the fact that those rooms would be cold because they wouldn't be heated and stuff like that. And I just like the feeling of knowing where everything is here, you know, and it does feel like a safe place. It does feel controllable. Whereas the land, you see, because I understand the land and I know how to control it or work with it, that doesn't seem like a life work to me, you know, in the way that my friend said, this is a life work, and he saw it as being a scary thing. Yeah, the land is a manageable thing for me. So in a way, the house being small and being manageable is really great. I love that.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So where does control come into the garden? Because you're, you know, you're. The gardens that you create are in some ways about not controlling it too much. So where's that line for you?

[Dan Pearson]

It's. Well, it's all about the line, I think it's all about, and it's an invisible line. And sometimes it's further away and sometimes it's closer and you can make it closer or further away, or you can tighten the string so it's tighter, or you can let it go from year to year. So it's really interesting and it's kind of mutable, but I think we've made quite of the 20 acres. If you think about this being like you drop a pebble into water and the immediate ripples are stronger, and that's where our most energy is used on Those stronger ripples. And as the ripples fade away and go out into the landscape, that's where your energy gets less. And that's exactly how I'm gardening this land, you know. So basically we've got a plinth that the house sits on with the contours being to either side. You know, you're basically moving out on the contour to either side. Where we've got the vegetable garden, the kitchen garden and the dry garden beyond. And then the other way we've got the other wing as we look out to the left, which is facing east. That's where the perennial garden is, the main garden is. And then our prospect in front of us, the land comes right up to the house. And I didn't want to be able to see garden from the house because I wanted to see, I wanted to feel part of landscape. I didn't want to be looking into something that needs controlling in the same way as a garden needs input. Because if you don't input, you then start to lose control. So I suppose the whole exercise is an exercise in control to various degrees. And. And it's about knowing where you're going to apply your energy and taking the fear out of the control by limiting the amount that you've got to put into high energy maintenance.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah. I remember talking to Christopher Lebrun about painting and him saying that you have to sort of master the techniques to be able to abstract fully. Because you can, in the abstraction you can kind of still see the technique.

[Dan Pearson]

Totally.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And the layers. Do you think it's the same with gardening?

[Dan Pearson]

Oh, completely, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's a. It's a life work, isn't it? Painting or gardening.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

Or cooking, you know, or dressmaking. It's just going to get better.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

The more you do of it and the deeper you go and. And I think it's. But I really do think it's important to learn your craft before you start to break the rules or break the rules down. Two slightly different things. And I remember dad saying to me when he was teaching me to draw, you know, you've got to learn to do this before you can do the painting. You can't just go in and make an impression of a place in painting if you don't know how to paint, or more to the point, if you don't know how to draw first. So you've got to learn that mastery of brain to hand connection. And it is exactly the same with the gardening, I think. And you. I felt when I came here That I had to relearn probably 30 years worth of learning, which I'd already done before I came here. Maybe more would have been 40 years and no 30 something years. Because we're gardening on a bigger scale here, you know, and I'm covering quite a lot of ground for the amount of energy we're putting into it. And my friend Jane, who lives across the way, you know, she said you've got to learn to build in loss when you garden at this scale, because there are other things that are competing you for the same space. You know, there's animals that come in and eat things and it's just beyond you, the amount of space that you can control. So you've got to be take a slightly more laissez faire approach to certain, certain things. But I do think that you really need to know your craft and knowing your craft is something that you need to keep on experimenting to get better at it. That's what this place is about, actually. It's about. It's a living canvas.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Can I ask you about this space we're sitting in here? So this is an outdoor kitchen. Again, you talked me through this earlier on the tour, but just describe how this works and how it comes into your daily life.

[Dan Pearson]

Well, the outdoor kitchen, it's basically a lean to on the end of the house. And there were lean tos here before. There was a piggery and an outdoor bathroom. And piggery, outdoor bathroom, coal shed. And they were very shambolic buildings and, you know, we didn't want to keep them, they weren't lovely. But the principle of coming out of the main stone house, which is like a solid object into something that gives way to landscape, you know, that was really nice. And this faces west, which is our primary view to Freezing Hill.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Freezing Hill.

[Dan Pearson]

Freezing Hill, which is in the winter. And the Bristol Channel on the other side hurls its weather over the top of Freezing Hill and the sun goes down behind there and it's really very wonderful prospect that way. So we spend. There's always at six o' clock in the evening during the summertime or the daylight hours. You know, there's always something special happening in the sky at six o' clock onwards. Usually, whatever the weather, there's something interesting happening. And this place allows you to be partly inside because you're covered from above and behind, and then partly outside because it's open on two sides to the front and to the west. And inside we've got. There's an outside louvre where the outside kitchen was. There's a shower there, which we use during the summer. We don't shower inside at all. And then an outdoor kitchen, which we cook in for most of the summer months and into the autumn and spring. And a big table where a number of outdoor activities happen, or things that might happen inside happen outside. I take meetings from this table so I can be having a business meeting out here in this amazing environment, you know, which for me is like a real wonderful luxury. And it's a simple space, you know, it's nicely made. We work with a guy called Jim Blackburn, who has made a little building with some lovely jointing, Japanese jointing in the building, but just simple farm vernacular otherwise.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

But you genuinely use this as your main kitchen, don't you?

[Dan Pearson]

In the winter months, which is one season of four, we're inside. And then for three seasons, you know, which is a long part of the year, we're predominantly using out here in the summer completely.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And your partner, Hugh is the cook, I gather.

[Dan Pearson]

Hugh's a wonderful cook.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And how did you meet Hugh?

[Dan Pearson]

That's another story. But it was a long time ago. I met him. He caught my eye and I caught his, and we followed each other. And it was just a special meeting. Meeting of. I just knew he was special from the other side of the street. You serious? Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

A complete stranger.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So you saw him across the street?

[Dan Pearson]

Across the street.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And then what happened?

[Dan Pearson]

This is a very private story, by the way.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Oh, you don't have to tell it, Dan. You don't have to tell it. So it's totally up to you. It's really lovely, though.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah, no, it's lovely now, I think about it. And we lost each other in the crowd and then we found each other again.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

You're kidding. That is so lovely.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah, yeah. And that was over 30 years ago, and we're still really good friends.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Who tapped who on the shoulder?

[Dan Pearson]

I went back. I was the first person that said something, but Hud found me. So it was a very brief meeting and we just arranged to meet later and then got to know each other over about three months.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So how long have you been together?

[Dan Pearson]

33 years. Yeah, yeah. So I met when we were 27 or something.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

How incredible.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So can you just tell us a little bit about the two of you and your sort of daily rituals and routines here? Because we all have them.

[Dan Pearson]

Yes. Well, we've now got two dogs, which are really great companions and part of our little family, really. And they're both very outdoor. They need big spaces, so they take us on walks Every morning and every evening. So that's one of the first things that happens during the day. We eat a breakfast which comes from the orchards. Always includes something that we've made, like.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

What kind of thing.

[Dan Pearson]

So we'll always have compots or we've got piles of apples which need processing here at the moment. Freezers full of fruit. I am pretty good actually at meditating twice a day. So I'll go down to the pond or find a quiet place early in the morning and then again in the evening. And that's been something that I've been doing for the last two years and have been meaning to do my whole life.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Amazing. How did you start that then?

[Dan Pearson]

Just a friend of ours who's the most unlikely person to be practicing meditation. Somebody who works in the film industry you'd think was living a very different life. And she just said it had really helped to center her and focus her. And I think that one of the things that I've really missed in the busyness of my life as it's as my businesses and my passions through the business have become the dominating force. I've really missed being on the ground and I've known it for years. But the speed at which things are moving because they're exciting don't allow me that touching downtime that I found when I was a child through the gardening. Enough of it. So the garden here is incredibly important for that touching downtime. But I also need more than that. I think as a point of being truly still because you're still doing in the gardening and your brain's still really pretty active because through the gardening you're able to free your brain up in a different way. But that's the beginning of a meditative state. And then the meditation is trying to hone that further. And it's something that obviously you need to work up to get better at and. But I'm really pleased I'm doing it.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So someone that doesn't meditate and was thinking about, well, I think it might be a good thing for them. How did you start? Well, where do you start?

[Dan Pearson]

So our friend Sandy said you must speak to my friend who taught me how to do it. So I did a one to one weekend. And it's tm Transcendental Meditation. Right. It's very simple in a way to learn, but the practice is not. It's something you get better at through practice. And I think you've just got to be ready to do it. That's what I felt. Yeah. And I've tried Meditation before and found that kind of my brain has been too distracted. But as long as you know that actually your brain is constantly active and.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

It'S just about being forgiving of yourself for that.

[Dan Pearson]

Yeah. It's about letting things go and then just trying to kind of clear your excess thoughts. Yeah. And you don't. I've never maybe two or three times managed to achieve that moment, but probably not for very long.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

How interesting.

[Dan Pearson]

But you do feel different. I think you feel different for doing it the rest of your day. You feel more mindful. I think you're just able to just take a step back before you might react to things or think or. And you know, a lot of what I do is about tuning into things properly. And I think if you want to do that really well, you've got to be in a good frame of mind. And the way that our lives are lived, the speed at which we live I think is not conducive to mindful thought. I think it's. We're all suffering from it and overload and living too fast and being distracted by a lot of that and things can be a lot simpler and better for it.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Is there anything else that you do for your well being in that way? And in quite a deliberate way, apart from the meditation?

[Dan Pearson]

The gardening? The gardening for me is a complete mainline access route into feeling better, into well being. You know, I see it. We've ended up doing quite a few gardens now for foundations which are dealing with well being and that's what they're dealing in.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Like the Maggie centres, for example.

[Dan Pearson]

The Maggie centres, exactly. And they don't call themselves well being centres, but it's all about feeling comfortable, feeling better. Interesting, isn't it, that the Maggies are based on a home? You know, each of those buildings is a home, a house supposed to feel like a home or a house. And the center point of that home or the house is a kitchen table around which you talk and feel more comfortable. Because it's just a kitchen table in the center of a house which is a safe place to talk about a big subject. And I think that Maggies are brilliant because they understand that gardens can allow you that access into a world that you know can make you feel better for having a green environment around you or the process of things that are living and in a continuum.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Isn't gardening lonely though? Because it's obviously solitary activity a lot of the time, isn't it?

[Dan Pearson]

I don't know if lonely is quite the right. I think you choose to be alone when you're gardening, but I think maybe solitary is the better word.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah. Solitude rather than loneliness.

[Dan Pearson]

Loneliness, yes. I think wonderful thing about gardening is that you can do it with somebody else as well. And it's often when the best conversations happen. And that's one of the things they found at Maggie's, was that men weren't particularly good at talking around a kitchen table because it was too intimate. But as soon as men started working together in the garden, that's when the conversations happened. And of course that can be the same for women too. You know, it's not exclusive at all, but I think it's very interesting as a. A way into feeling better because you're doing something physical that's about past, present and the future. You're based in real time. It has to be real time gardening because you can't rush it. You can rush it, but then it becomes false or superficial, a superficial version of the same thing. And I think that's enormously grounding. So the well being part of it is. That's one of the reasons I love doing it and always have and why it's always been a retreat.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah. I'd love to ask you. I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of place attachment. I expect this will resonate with you, but this idea that the places that you live in are somehow kind of carved into your psyche, how do you feel about that? It's like this piece of land that you've chosen to inhabit, you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

[Dan Pearson]

Well, I think it's interesting, isn't it, how people, as we get older, you often circle back to something that not all of us. Of course, if you're lucky enough to have had something, have the advantage of living somewhere when you're young that has meant something to you. People do circle back in this cycle that we're part of. And I was great friends with some really good friends in my twenties when I lived in a place called Bonington Square in Vauxhall. A lot of them were New Zealanders and they've circled back to home to New Zealand. You know, to feel part of something that's familiar to them, just the quality of being in a place that is ingrained in your system somehow. Whether it's the smell or the temperature or the food or the people or whatever it is that makes that post particular. I think it does become ingrained somehow and part of you. And I think for me, you know, there are aspects of this place which are same but very different to where I was brought up, you know, in terms of it being a safe place somewhere that's. I don't need to go anywhere from here. I don't ever go into Bath in our local town, once or twice a year, three times a year, I choose to go down there. It's four miles away. You know, we're very autonomous here. And I think that's one of the special things that I go to back to from Hill Cottage, that childhood home, you know, we. We never went anywhere from there unless we needed to, because it was. It provided everything for us. And I think that idea of safety and the home is, is. Is something that I return to very much. And also being part of a landscape, something that's a bit wilder than you, than you can control. That garden there, that's very nice to feel. There are places I can't control here. That feeling of being cooped up in London. I outgrew my places. A client of mine actually once said, you need potting on. And what she meant was, you're ready to move, you know, you need to move. And she was so right about getting out of London. And it was just an interesting analogy. And because I'd ended up, first of all, I ended up outgrowing my roof garden in Vauxhall, which was my first real home. And then I outgrew my garden in Peckham. You know, we didn't outgrow the house, I outgrew the gardens. And there's no way I can outgrow this place. It's going to outgrow me, probably, and I'll end up like Ms. Joy, overwhelmed by it one day.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Will he be here forever?

[Dan Pearson]

It feels like a nice place to be. I don't have any desire to leave it. I want to be here more and more. I find it more and more difficult to be away from it with work taking me away. It's the place I want to recenter myself. And let's hope we can continue living here for a long time.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

So you've been here 15 years. You created this really magical landscape. It's your home. So how do you put into words what it means to you?

[Dan Pearson]

It's a refuge, it's an oasis, it's an opportunity, it's a luxury, it's a safe place. It's somewhere we can share with other people more and more. So now, actually, it's become something that resonates. We've put all this love into it that other people can. It's tangible and other people want to be part of it. Those people that get it. And that's a really wonderful feeling, that feeling of being able to share something that's got some soul. And I think it always did have a soul, this place, but it was buried. And the nice thing about being part of it is that we've managed to kind of nurture it back into something that feels more accessible and a good place to be.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Can I just finish with just asking you for some practical advice? Because you've got so much wisdom. If someone has a tiny courtyard in their. Outside their flat, or a little part of a roof terrace or something, what would be your advice to them as to how to start getting into gardening? Because it, you know, this is amazing, what you've got here, but you have to start somewhere.

[Dan Pearson]

So what would you.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

What would you do?

[Dan Pearson]

Don't rush it.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

Take time to look. I think that's. That's the key thing. It was very interesting, actually. The first garden I made for myself, which was this tiny roof garden in Vauxhall in this place called Bonnington Square, which we guerrilla gardened the square. I was the first person to make a roof garden in a line of Victorian houses with extensions on the back, you know, and it was tiny, 4 by 3 meters. And then the people on either side made a roof garden in response to mine because they liked to see that I was outside using that space and obviously loving it. And they weren't gardeners, but they got into gardening through the roof garden. And by the time I left after six years of being there, there were five or six, maybe seven or eight roof gardens that had spread across these roofs and people were just switched on, I think, through seeing what was possible and trying it themselves. So taking your time and not rushing is important. Looking to see what might do well in your locale or somebody else is doing that you could do and not being afraid to try it. The beautiful thing about gardening, I think, is there are rules, but you can break them and you can make it your own. And it's a bit like cooking, you know, you just have to get in there to learn how to do it. And there's nothing like learning through doing it.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

And what if you don't have any outside space? Then what do you do?

[Dan Pearson]

Well, I mean, I think it's amazing now that there's so many. So many people, young people in particular, with indoor gardens and green spaces and rooms which look like rooms I occupied in the 70s, when there was. In the 70s, there was a big, you know, indoor plant thing going on, wasn't there? And I recognized Plants from when I was a kid, you know, I'd go into my parents friends houses and they were full of cheese plants growing across walls and you know, all those things that now are part of that environment again because people can't necessarily afford to have their own outdoor space and it allows them that connection and brings the green inside. And there are lots of people with allotments, you know, places which aren't theirs, but they can garden which allow them that connection to being able to grow. And people do become quite home orientated around the allotment. You know, they'll make a shed nice and place to be in the shed or a greenhouse. And very quickly they set up a little place that feels like a little home on an allotment. So they can be quite makeshift sometimes.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

I've got a really clear vision of you now being a child pottering around in your garden at home. And that was obviously hugely formative for you. But if you're a parent and you've got children, how do you inspire them with nature in the way that you were?

[Dan Pearson]

I think maybe just. Making them feel like it's somewhere they can go and make a mess. Yeah, mud pies. Basically. I started through, I had a troll collection. I always had a troll on the go. They were my friends. I loved them up to the age of five. And then I started making homes for the trolls out of bricks and mud. So there were like these little caves and the trolls lived in. And then I started making gardens on the top of the brick and mud caves. And then the gardens became the more interesting things and the trolls got the forgotten. But it was through messing around in the mud and noticing that I could make moss grow or plant a little seedling tree. And it was, I could grow a little seedling tree that was just through pottering around, making a mess and not feeling and just feeling like I had permission to do so and to get messy. We've been working with little forest school where the kids classroom is. It's actually outdoors. You know, they don't have an indoor place, they've got bivouacs. But it's preschool. Their experience of learning is all outside, whatever the weather. And it's just fantastic. You're just going and seeing what they can make out of a muddy puddle and some mud and a stick and some paper. And I remember playing around after it had rained, you know, with the rain that went down the lane, you know, making dams and, you know, that's probably the way into it. And then you find yourself before, you know, it you're growing and nurturing. And the first plant I was ever given was an amaryllis, which of course is guaranteed to grow. So I planted it and it flowered this great opulent flower. And the alchemy, going back to the alchemy, that was like the first time I realized that I was like, wow. I kind of was involved in that process. Terribly simple, but enabling, really, of something that is really. When you see kids who've got this connection, you know, I'm so all for nurturing it because even if they don't pursue it as a child, it's so often something they come back to. And most of my friends who took to gardening, you know, they, they always cite a grandfather or a parent or an aunt or somebody, a neighbor who did it, who asked them to be, I don't know, come and help on their allotment or whatever it was, or help them pick beans. You know, it was a simple way into it that then became something that allowed them to connect to cooking. So I've got friends who've got into growing things through cooking, you know, because they wanted to grow their own things and suddenly find that they're the most amazing vegetable gardener, you know, and then they're off or through, you know, starting with a new piece of ground, a new house, you know, a blank canvas.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah.

[Dan Pearson]

And not being afraid to make mistakes.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Yeah. Such good advice, I think. Dan, thanks so much. It's been such a memorable morning for me. I think you've just got so much right here. I have to say I've taken a.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Lot from it just in terms of just being.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

I don't know. Yeah. You feel so ingratiated into this place, you know, living most of your life outside in the fresh air, and you're being very mindful about it. I. I think it's to be admired. So I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.

[Dan Pearson]

Pleasure. Thank you.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Huge thanks to Dan and thank you.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

To all of you for listening.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

If you enjoyed today's episode and can spare a moment to leave a rating.

[Interviewer (possibly Matt Gibbard)]

Or review, it really does help the.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Podcast and I'd be very grateful. I'm also pleased to say that Homing is expanding. From the beginning of February. We'll be releasing a new episode every week. So if you're not already following the show, just tap the follow button and new episodes will magically land in your feed as soon as as they're released. You can watch the video version of this conversation on YouTube, see clips on Instagram, and the full walk around tour of Dan's Garden is available to members on Patreon. You'll find all of those under the handle Homing with Matt. This episode was produced by Pod Shop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again for being here and see you on the next one.

[Dan Pearson]

Bye.

[Narrator/Host (Matt Gibbard)]

Bye.