Gardening for nature

Exclusive interview with Daniel Combes

April 2024

By Sam Peters, Planted Co-Founder

Dan Combes’ voice becomes ever so slightly hushed when he begins to describe the vision for his burgeoning garden design practice.

Not because he’s embarrassed. Far from it. But because, with his client list growing by the day, he wants to ensure he chooses his words carefully. With his brain working fast and his business growing accordingly, this passionate environmentally focused designer also has quite a story to tell.

‘We design gardens but the vision, the dream, is much bigger than that,’ the founder of Daniel Combes Garden Design explains in the courtyard opposite the staddle stone barn office he took over two years ago.

Six years of hard graft, learning the tools of the trade, building a client base and establishing a sustainable garden design business forged upon a deep love of ecological process, have led the 36-year-old designer and environmentalist to the point where he can begin to think big. Seriously big.

‘We’re just beginning to do more exciting things. But, if we look at where we started six years ago and where we are now, in 10 or 20 years who is to say we can’t start to creating giant habitat and conservation zones and linking these projects together?

‘It’s not all about gardens. Gardens are a vehicle by which we express something we love doing and that’s design and designing gardens. But we’ve also got a bigger dream. Having serious impact, long term.’

Dan’s office is just a short gallop from the quiet village of south Wiltshire village of Dinton where he grew up. It’s in the heart of the Nadder Valley, part of the Cranborne Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

This is chalk down country, where the regimented lines resulting from decades of industrialised agriculture dominate the landscape, despite its protected status. A green and pleasant land to many, to others it’s the manifestation of generations of poor environmental practice driven by ever more short-sighted policies which have contrived to leach the land of nutrients, nature of habitats and farmers of profits.

Pockets of beauty can still be found. For example, the old bluebell wood known as the Hanging, running along a thin strip of this pretty valley between Salisbury and Shaftesbury, where some of Dan’s fondest childhood memories were formed, remains largely intact.    

Which is more than can be said of another place he spent four of his most formative years; the Amazon Rainforest.

‘By the time I’d finished education, which was all quite restrictive and confined, and having grown up in a small village, I wanted to explore,’ he explains.

‘I spent three months living with the Ashaninka Tribe in the Peruvian Amazon with no comms, no phone signal. Nothing. Completely off grid. I didn’t speak any English. I was sleeping on an earthen floor with thatched roofs.’

Dan’s decision to turn down a place at Bristol University and travel deep into the rainforest, where he witnessed firsthand the destructive influence fossil fuel exploration had on communities and ecosystems alike, was not immediately to his parents liking.

But that initial trip, and others that followed, would provide a ‘conscious awakening’ to the boundless beauty and epic scale of nature.   

‘I had the woodland and landscape of my childhood full of imagination and dreams but what really awakened my senses to nature were those trips to the Amazon,’ he says.

‘That was my true environmental awakening.

‘I was seeing this pristine rainforest and this oil and gas exploration going on and I couldn’t reconcile how humans could have such a negative impact on this beautiful environment and at the expense of other lives and communities. How could we be so destructive? Why weren’t we paying attention to all the myriad of other lives. Why were we so human focused?

‘It was a conscious awakening.  I’d come back home, make some money and head back to the rainforest. I consciously challenged myself to head deeper and deeper into the forest each time.’

Dan undertook a course in botany and political economy at Arizona University where, among other philosophers, he read Marx and Descartes. Upon returning to the UK, moved he to London in a bid to move away from the subsistence lifestyle to which he’d happily become accustomed but was not going to earn him the keys to his own property.

Embarking on a series of jobs, he worked in a catering kitchen in south Wimbledon while living at the other end of the Piccadilly Line on Turnpike Lane in the north London borough of Haringey.

But, while he tried his hand at many things, his love of the outdoors and nature endured. When times got tough, Dan always reverted to gardening.

‘I had a pretty tough time in London, working the most ridiculous hours imaginable, and didn’t really know or understand how to connect. I didn’t really fit in and decided I wanted to go back to gardening.

‘When you spend a lot of time in nature you strip a lot of your armour off and become deeply connected to the natural world. But also deeply impacted by stimulus around you. You become quite sensitive. Moving to London working with one quite manipulative person in particular had a huge impact. In retrospect I don’t think I was very happy.   

‘I’d work 10 hour days for six days a week for the whole summer. It was a means to an end. I worked in some really interesting gardens for some really interesting people. I was constantly noticing different plants and trees. That had an impact on me.’

A voracious reader, Dan immersed himself in historic literature to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between design, nature and farming.

‘I was looking at the history of English landscapes and read a lot of Oliver Rackham,’ he said.

‘In America it was all wilderness and national parks. I came back to England and although we had this green and pleasant land I had this realisation that this whole country is farmed. Everything. We have no wild spaces, zero wilderness.

‘We’re living in the most nature depleted landscape in Europe. It’s all managed. Take the uplands where you would normally expect to find birds of prey. They’re all persecuted by humans.

‘Why our landscape looks like it does today is partly due to that industrialised agricultural relationship. But it’s also to do with design and architecture. Whether it’s the landscape movement of Capability Brown and expressions of Arcadia and visions shown in some of the great country estates.’

Eventually, Dan discovered the path upon which he was designed to tread.    

‘I got a job working for an amazing garden designer called Dan Back and I cycled around on a bike looking after gardens. I looked at what Dan was doing and saw him drawing and designing these spaces. I had this ‘aha’ moment. I realised I’d been studying science but I wasn’t a scientist.

‘I loved nature and working with the natural world. I was thinking ‘how do you have an impact on landscape?’ In Dan Back I saw someone working with plants, working with the natural world and drawing. Participating in the discussion, however depleted that discussion is, on what a landscape should look like.

‘That conversation is through an architectural lens. I started to draw, which I’d never done before. I had this second flowering as a human. I realised I could express my relationship with nature and understanding of botany and plants through a creative medium. I found a lot of freedom in that art and aesthetic. It was a job I never knew existed. I realised ‘that’s what I want to do’.’

Under Back, himself schooled by the great Arne Maynard, Dan grew in confidence, and he returned to his roots in rural Wiltshire, where his traditional farming family had previously rubbished his theories, despite the economic challenges so many farmers faced.

Now, with a broadening understanding of the rapid acceleration in global warming and biodiversity decline, the ideas which once saw Dan tagged a ‘loon’ receive a more sympathetic hearing.

‘That resistance we (environmentalists) first encountered is dissipating,’ he says. ‘It’s weird. I found it much harder from 18 to 25 to discuss my ideas about landscape, agriculture and human interaction with nature. Now it feels like the conversation has shifted so much. Most clients are coming up to me and saying ‘I want to rewild’.

‘It’s amazing. The conversation just drops. I used to feel like a total outsider whereas now, it just feels totally normal. I think the shift is huge.’

Today, in relative terms, business is flourishing. Dan Combes is establishing a reputation for delivering significant projects at scale which go way beyond traditional garden design.

‘I’m doing one job in Tetbury (300 acres) and one near Cirencester (100 acres). They both back onto the Monarchs Ways. Both projects have got the house and garden but the wider landscape we are proposing this mosaic of woodland, pasture, meadow.

‘I was just like ‘what about creating the Monarch’s Way habitat corridor? As a conservation project, how about getting in touch with all the landowners along the Monarch’s Way and saying let’s create something amazing.

‘Why not all give a strip of land? They could create this huge habitat corridor all the way along the Monarch’s Way. Imagine that as an initiative, as a conservation project which goes in line with the work we are already doing.

‘With ideas like that, we’ve started to gain access to land and some really interesting projects and people. Affecting change on scale. Now that is exciting.’

Well, I told you he was thinking big. Dan Combes, without question, is going places. And those places will be all the richer and more biodiverse for his visit.

Ends

For more information visit www.danielcombesgardendesign.co.uk