James Alexander-Sinclair FSGD is one of the foremost garden designers in the United Kingdom. He has designed gardens from Cornwall to the Western Isles and from London to Moscow - and importantly for Horatio's Garden in Scotland.
"I have been building, designing and looking after gardens for the past forty years. It seems like a very long stretch but, at the same time, it seems to have gone by at warp speed. From callow youth to someone hovering terrifyingly close to a pension. I can still remember my first job which involved pruning a very large honeysuckle. It covered three stories of a house in London: laden with heavily scented flowers alive with bees.
The plant was undoubtedly bit scraggy but still lovely: all it needed was a trim. I was not absolutely sure what I was doing so started cautiously with delicate little snips but soon realised that at that rate I would be there for days so became a bit braver. Out came the loppers and larger chunks of honeysuckle began to fall to the ground. Confidence rising I moved on to a saw.... in retrospect this was not my finest idea as by the end of the day I was surrounded by the fallen tendrils of a formerly magnificent plant. All that was left was a single woody stem clinging forlornly to the building - the only upside was that it was still alive. Plants can be remarkably tolerant of the incompetence of people.
I don’t what it was about that day - it was unsatisfactory in so many ways, not least because the client was quite miffed by the state of her honeysuckle and I did not get paid, but I woke up the next day determined to be a gardener. It came as a bit of a relief as I had tried and rejected so many other professions over the previous few years. I had been a door-to-door salesman, photographer, barman, bus conductor, ice cream man, jeans salesman, parcel wrapper, cleaner, kitchen porter, waiter, washer upper and grocer: none of which had quite hit the spot.
So it was decided, a gardener I would be. I began with the manual labour side: I mixed cement, carried great slabs of paving stone, dug holes and drove mowers. Some days were balmy, some were freezing cold and I went home muddy and soaked to the skin but still I carried on. This was all about the business end of gardens - the grubby underpinnings rather than the colour and the beauty that most people see when they walk through a garden. That would come in time but I needed to understand the basics.
Time passed and I realised that I had managed to absorb a lot of of knowledge about design and, more importantly, plants purely by being in their company. It is much easier than learning from a book - apart from anything else often the photograph in the book looks nothing at all like the real thing! you get roughly the same problem with passport photographs. Armed with this knowledge I moved away from the bricks and mortar towards the true heart of gardens and began to understand the power of plants.
Beginning small I started with window boxes and small gardens gradually stretching my wings as the jobs became bigger, the clients more demanding and the challenges more exciting. I learnt how colours can change moods, how many different shades of green you can find and how even the most agitated mind can be calmed by a garden.
This understanding gives another dimension to gardens: often I make nice gardens for nice people. Gardens where their children can play and where they can entertain friends. This is all marvellous but it is a small step to take that skill and apply it to gardens which can benefit hundreds (maybe thousands) of people. The most obvious manifestation of this is the garden I made for Horatio’s Garden in Scotland. It was an immense privilege to be invited and it is and, I think, will always remain the the most important and most emotionally all encompassing garden I will ever make. The message is powerful but oh so simple and the benefits are immediate for patients, their families and the hospital staff.
That is how I found my purpose - it took time and every step (even the ones that led nowhere) was important. There is not a lot of mileage in conjecture so, unless I get the chance to live my life all over again, I will never know whether I would have been happier or more fulfilled had I stuck with being a waiter rather than becoming a gardener.
Somehow I rather doubt it - even though I always felt that I would have made an outstanding Butler!
