Lessons in landscaping – and diplomacy – from a 37-year career

In 1987, Stephen Crisp interviewed for the post of head gardener at Winfield House, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and home to 12.5 acres of prime central London landscape. Crisp, then 27, hesitated.

“I was a bit underwhelmed,” he said. “It was so much smaller than Leeds Castle, where I was head gardener, and the garden was – let’s call it a sleeping beauty.” He could see its potential though, so he took the job.

Since then, Crisp has overseen the development of the garden and tended to all the typical concerns of any substantial landscaping project. But Winfield House is far from a typical project. Security fences, discreetly screened by dense trees and shrubs, line the edges of the property, and the 35-room redbrick house acts as a showcase for soft diplomacy in a country where gardens are part of the national DNA.

For the past 37 years, Crisp has dealt with the special issues that arise with a space that is also a backdrop for major international diplomacy. That includes considering costs – all upkeep is paid for with American tax dollars – and working with a rotating cast of characters: 11 ambassadors over the course of seven presidencies, each bringing a new approach to the home’s outdoor space.

Winfield House, built in the 1930s for Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, is not quite on the grand scale of Wrotham Park in Herefordshire, its stand-in in the Netflix series “The Diplomat,” but the garden, first laid out in the English pastoral style 200 years ago, is the biggest in London after Buckingham Palace’s. It includes a five-acre lawn to accommodate occasions such as the Fourth of July – typically attended by about 4,000 people – and landing presidential helicopters without decapitating the trees.

Today, the gardens are far from sleeping. The formal areas around the house are full of color and layers of seasonal interest, with plenty of space to have a quiet diplomatic chat, disturbed only by the buzz of bees. The present ambassador, Jane Hartley, wrote by email that she takes frequent walks around the grounds with her dog, Bear, to admire Crisp’s work. “Enjoying the garden has helped me to remain centered and allowed me to decompress from the pace of an ambassador’s agenda,” she said.

Crisp pointed out various commemorative trees – largely American – that mark each ambassador’s tenure, a tradition he introduced. The first was a liquidambar, planted by Charles Price in 1989. Maria Tuttle, the wife of Robert Tuttle (2005-2009), recently visited and went to inspect the young coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) they had planted. It now towers at 30 feet.

The North American varieties on the grounds are all able to withstand Britain’s changing climate, but “it is not trying to reproduce a piece of America; it is an English garden,” Crisp said. This is left to the gardens at the new U.S. Embassy in southeast London, where the planting – which he and his team of three horticulturalists tend – represents several different American climatic zones.

Sustainability has always been of great importance to Crisp, who has kept abreast and ahead of the changing attitude in British gardens toward working with nature, rather than conquering it. It also includes keeping a thrifty eye on the American people’s dollar. Accordingly, his team grows most of the plant stock, makes its own compost and only hand waters. If the lawn frazzles brown in summer, so be it; it will recover with the autumn rains. So far, spraying with a biological control has kept the buxus parterre designed in the time of Walter and Lee Annenberg (1969-1974) healthy, and it has largely evaded attack from fungal blight and the box tree caterpillar, which have decimated many British topiary gardens.

The self-sustaining system doesn’t generally stretch to produce for the house, however, and most of a kitchen garden patch introduced under President Barack Obama’s ambassador, Matthew Barzun, who had young children, has gone. The fruit trees remain, however, and it now also houses beehives – President Donald Trump’s ambassador Woody Johnson’s idea – which produced 400 pots of Winfield House honey last year.

Instead, the chefs buy what they need for the table (save honey), and Crisp visits New Covent Garden flower market on a weekly basis. “You’d need two acres of cutting garden to supply the house,” he says. “If you are going to pay someone £30,000 a year to grow flowers, you can buy a lot of flowers for £30,000. We are getting better value for money.”

Arranging the flowers is an important part of the job, and Crisp works with the ambassadors – or, more usually, their wives, who he says tend to be the ones most interested in the garden – to create displays to their suiting. Many have preferred the country-house style, but Hartley is keen on contemporary arrangements in glass vases, a challenge Crisp has met by using sterilizing tablets in the water to keep it crystal clear for a week.

The contribution of Hartley’s husband, Ralph Schlosstein, has been to add koi carp to the pond in the Sculpture Garden, created for the millennium. Crisp has designed a scheme for that area consisting largely of golden plants. How does he handle those who wish to leave their mark in a way that might not be considered a positive contribution to the garden?

“There is always a dialogue, as you treat the garden as if it is theirs during their time,” he says. Employing his own long-learned diplomatic skills, Crisp would say: ‘That is a really interesting idea, but the reason that is there is because of X and Y.…”

Any future ambassadorial ambitions to chop down a clump of historic trees or dig up the lawn for a swimming pool will be for Crisp’s as-yet-unknown successor to deal with, as he retired this month. He is modestly sanguine that, despite having provided a continuous thread of stability and vision for the garden over the decades, his own interventions may be redesigned by future hands.

“I am only a temporary custodian,” he says. And off he heads for the Cotswolds, at last to create a garden of his own.