Noel Kingsbury: Biography

Biography

Noel Kingsbury has been professionally active in horticulture since 1986, but had been a keen gardener as a child. The story of his ‘bunking off’ school on Tuesday afternoons to visit the Chelsea Flower Show has become something of a legend.

During 1986-1993 Noel ran a nursery near Bristol, growing herbaceous plants and tender species suitable for conservatories. His interest in the latter put him firmly in the vanguard of ‘The New Exoticists’, a young generation of gardeners who were interested in pushing the limits of what it was possible to grow outside and recapturing something of the spirit of adventure of Victorian horticulture.

Undertaking a number of garden design projects during the 1990s, Noel began to explore the possibilities of growing plants in ‘artificial ecosystems’. The problem he recognised was:

people were wanting wildflowers, but often had a hopelessly romantic notion of what that meant. The fact is that we have very few garden-worthy native plants, indeed we have a pretty restricted native flora anyway, so I began to be interested in combining natives and non-natives, in combinations which would require minimal intervention from the gardener.

Recognising that there was very little knowledge about such planting in Britain, despite William Robinson having been a pioneer in doing just this back in the 19th century, Noel looked overseas, to see what the rest of Europe was doing. 1996 was, he says:

my annus mirabilis, I went to Brazil, and met the great Roberto Burle Marx, to the US where I formed a friendship with James van Sweden, but seeing what was happening in Germany was a revelation, where gardeners and landscape architects were learning from this incredibly rich tradition of Pflanzensoziologie. Places like Westpark in Munich just blew me away, all the plants there were familiar with but used in totally different ways, all informed by ecological science. This was also the year I met Piet Oudolf, whose combination of real architectural design with a passion for plants has continued to be an inspiration.

A close association with planting ideas from Germany and Holland has been a central part of Noel’s life ever since. The whole field of ‘ecological planting design’ also drew him into working with the department of landscape at Sheffield University, a world centre for the integration of ecology, landscape and horticulture. For the last few years, Noel has been undertaking research on perennial plant selection for a PhD at Sheffield University.