“Are diamonds your best friend? No! My garden is!” This is how the American businesswoman, writer and television presenter Martha Stewart responded to an Interview Magazine interview. The queen of the American lifestyle, who spent five months in prison for securities fraud and other charges, even inspiring the character of Judy King in the third season of Orange is the New Black, has found her therapy and another avenue of business in landscaping .
Imitating the paintings of Claude Monet, his garden has pergolas where vines of warm colors grow and which are accessed by paths perfectly outlined by flowers and wild plants. “I am fascinated when borage or mallow sprouts appear spontaneously among my tomato plants and my diplodenias. Thanks to my team of landscapers, we managed to integrate these species by transplanting them where they can take root better. I have also learned to see its uses in food and it is something that I love to share with my readers and my audience on YouTube ”, he added in an interview on The Night Show with Jimmy Fallon.
“Stewart is a true gardener. She, King Carlos III and actresses like Sienna Miller or Zoey Deschanel have gone a step beyond the simple urban garden, even before the pandemic, when we all fell in love with growing some vegetables at home and pampering our outdoor spaces, ”says Lauren Owens, Professor at the British Academy of Garden Design. Unlike our country, where only a few centers teach landscaping as a degree, in England and France, this activity, which uses the art of cultivating plants with the purpose of creating a beautiful environment, is all the rage and there are many architects and interior designers who they incorporate it into their curriculum vitae.
Some of them, thanks to the passion for green of various personalities from the world of entertainment, have become famous. This is the case of Dan Bifano, the renowned landscaper who has exquisitely designed and maintains Oprah Winfrey’s rose bushes in Montecito, California, with the most delicate varieties such as the Brass Band and the Marilyn Monroe. The television presenter and writer also owns an organic farm on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. There, Oprah has the services of her friend of more than twenty years Bob Greene, a personal trainer expert in nutrition.
“Working with a garden is working over time, working for the long term. When devising a project, landscapers make an estimate of what will happen over the years, so after our execution it is essential that there is a specialized team that is in charge of maintenance”, explains Alejandra Coll, landscaper in charge of Asilvestrada, company responsible, among other projects, for the green spaces of the Casa Bonay Hotel in Barcelona and the Casa Nereta in Cadaqués, the Jardí de l’Abadesa restaurant and the All Yours store, both in Barcelona.
Long before Stewart or Winfrey gave free rein to this green enthusiasm that today is very popular among millennials and generation Z in their fight against climate change, it was King Carlos III who established himself as a benchmark in the world of horticulture, as shown even in The Crown series. More than forty years ago, the now monarch of the United Kingdom acquired the Highgrove House estate, in Gloucestershire, with the aim of spending time near his now wife and queen consort, Camilla Parker-Bowles.
It was there that his current devotion to gardening was born and, with the help of expert landscapers, he converted more than 35 acres of land into organic gardens including a meadow of edible wildflowers, something totally innovative and radical at the time. From then until today, her Kitchen Garden produces 100% organic vegetables and fruits to supply all of Buckingham Palace.
From royalty to the White House. Former first lady Michelle Obama became interested in gardening as a tool to combat childhood obesity. Realizing that her two daughters practically did not eat fruit or vegetables at school, she decided to start growing vegetables in a part of the presidential garden in 2009. A year later, those more than 100 square meters gave rise to more than 600 kg of organic products.
In 2012 he published the book American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden recounting that experience. Currently, the Obamas spend a lot of time at their house, converted into a farm, on Martha’s Vineyard, with neighbors like the Clooneys or the Spielbergs. There, Michelle continues to grow vegetables, and her gardens are also splendid with hydrangeas, sunflowers, and bougainvillea in the summer.
The singer and songwriter Sting is also passionate about nature and the source of health that it provides. Like Michelle Obama, it all started to improve his family’s diet. In his villa in Tuscany, Il Palagio has a vineyard of more than 150 hectares and with the help of a landscaper he created the perfect environment to produce not only wine, but also olive oil and honey that is now even sold in Harrod’s department stores. From london. He himself, along with gardeners who keep their land 100% organic, has been delving into the world of agriculture. He says that he relaxes him before locking himself in the recording studio that was also built on the farm.
Another lover of gardening is the rapper Snoop Dogg, who was personally taught by Martha Stewart herself the art of caring for flowers and plants. After serving his time in prison, Dogg has found in gardening the ideal consolation when melancholy overwhelms him, according to what he told The New York Times a few weeks ago.
In the world of cinema there are also fervent lovers of having the most beautiful garden in harmony with their homes. This is the case of Sienna Miller’s cottage, where the actress spends as much time as she can after filming. With gardenias and peonies, she also uses this precious space in the British capital to grow fruits and vegetables such as kale, which she uses to healthily enrich her diet.
Meanwhile, Zoey Deschanel makes her vegetable garden thrive using hydroponic growing tools, which require 80% less liquid than a traditional culture, while Jake Gyllenhaal loves to put his hands in the dirt to personally maintain the garden he had built for his house and which was the seed of a project to teach children how to farm and cook and for which he is currently an ambassador.
“I grew up surrounded by the gardens of my community in California. My family taught me to sow, plow and differentiate floral species”, the protagonist of Brokeback Mountain (On forbidden ground in the Spanish version) explained to AD. Other gardening enthusiasts include Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts and Ellen Degeneres, to whom her partner Portia de Rossi gave a gardening kit for her 61st birthday.
The designer and couturier Oscar de la Renta, who died almost a decade ago, considered his garden a work of haute couture. He spent as much time as he could between his lavish estate in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, and the one he had built on the US east coast. It was precisely in the latter, in Connecticut, where with his first wife, Vogue France editor François Langlade, they decided to build a garden that we can compare to the floral and refined creations of the designer worn by everyone from Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan to Sarah Jessica Parker. and even Taylor Swift. Ralph Waldo Emerson already said it in his time: “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit”.
