Page 21 - Damianos Sotheby's International Realty Magazine Vol. 3

Last year, we had a boxwood caterpillar,” laments Tim Rees. “That might sound like an innocent little creature, but it’s not. We lost a lot of box, so now we’re looking at another planting. But I don’t mind that—it’s an op- portunity, and you have to embrace those in gardening, as in life.”
Rees can perhaps afford to be more philosophical about this unwel- come intruder. The celebrated garden designer is, at least, speaking of his own special retreat: the garden that surrounds his house outside Spoletto, in Umbria, which has been 20 years in the making and where, work allow-
ing, he spends three months of the year.
“When I’m there, I’m working on the garden and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ll
keep working until I absolutely have to retire. Gardens are a vocation for me, and we haven’t totally finished that one yet,” he says of himself and his artist partner. “When we have, we’ll sell it. We like a project.”
A project is certainly one thing Rees is never short of. The co-founder of the U.K.-based Trees Associates garden-design consultancy has won international recognition for what those in the garden world call his “plantsmanship”: his especially refined appreciation for plant forms, colours and—something of a signature in his work, for their variety, subtlety and permanence—textures.
Rees even has a plant named after him, the product of an expedition he joined to Papua New Guinea. “Though the fact that it’s Pratia angulata ‘Tim Rees’ engenders a certain humility,” he jokes, “prat” being a derogatory English colloquialism. “It’s an attractive enough little plant with a deep-blue violet flower, but it’s never destined to populate the world’s gardens, despite my best efforts,” he adds ruefully.
His training was as much academic as it was practical, at the University of Ox- ford Botanic Garden, then the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he launched landmark conferences before directing the garden-design course at London’s In- chbald School of Design. “That learning certainly shaped how I look at a garden,” explains Rees. “With a sense of space, which needs an intuitive and emotional reac- tion, and with a sense of empathy for your client, but also with a regard for how humans interact with gardens. That’s why, for example, community gardens can be so powerful in bringing people together, because gardens need maintenance. Plants are the dynamic aspect of a garden because a garden is rooted in time. It will change right before your eyes. It will disintegrate unless you work on it.”
That’s why Rees returns to Italy whenever he can, tending to the terraces around the house, the large pots of evergreens “to create a green architecture,” as he puts
DESIGN EXCHANGE TIM REES
treesassociates.com
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