Discover Lambeth Palace Garden’s 1,000-year history with the head gardener Nick Stewart, exploring heritage, change and urban wildlife.
Lambeth Palace Garden is located by the River Thames in one of the busiest areas of central London. It’s a hidden oasis of calm in the midst of all the urban commotion, a green site that has been continually cultivated for more than a thousand years. What is it like to be a gardener working from day to day through the seasons in such a place, one with a history that stretches back for so many centuries?
This talk offers a rare opportunity to see behind the medieval walls and towers, and to explore a little of the enclosed space in the company of the head gardener entrusted with its care. Some questions we will consider over the course of this talk are:
- How might the gardeners on the present 10-acre site keep alive the links to the garden’s long and varied history?
- Is it desirable to allow the space to evolve and change through time? If so, how might that be done?
- Are there practices and measures that can be put in place to benefit the diverse urban wildlife found within the garden and neighboring areas?
After completing his degree at Warwick University, Nick Stewart Smith went to live in Barcelona where over the next five years he took his first steps into professional horticulture as a gardener in the city’s celebrated Parc de la Cuitadella.
Returning to England, he became head gardener for the National Trust at Overbecks, a stunning subtropical garden on the south Devon coast. From there, he took on a similar role at Chequers in the Chilterns, the Prime Minister’s country residence, and then went back home to London to take charge of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s historic ten acre garden at Lambeth Palace.
He now lives in North Kent where he works as a freelancer involved in various nature projects.
He is the author of two books, The Thousand Year Old Garden: Inside the Secret Garden at Lambeth Palace (The History Press, 2023) and Wildflowers of London (Murmur, 2025).
This London Parks and Gardens Zoom talk takes place Monday, November 9. £5 – £10. Register at Eventbrite UK HERE.
