It was the garden designer John Brookes who first coined the expression “the room outside”. That was in 1969, but over nearly four decades the idea has established a firm grip on the British gardening psyche. The garden is a place to sit, to eat, to play. There must be firm structure, space for leisure; wildness must be tamed to allow these activities to take place. This idea still dominates small-garden design, even at Chelsea.

But what if you don’t want another room? What if you want to look outside and see plants tangling with one another, nature only semi-tamed? This is the aesthetic running through the work of life and business partners Adam Woolcott and Jon Smith.

They want a return to plants and nature. They want it now. And that’s why they clicked from the moment they met.

After working together for several years, aiming one day to design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, their eureka moment came one Sunday morning driving from their home in Bishop’s Stortford to a friend’s in Stratford, East London. They had often passed the church of St John the Baptist in Leytonstone, taking little notice. “But this particular spring the churchyard had exploded with wild flowers. It looked so effortlessly beautiful, and so in contrast with the area around – built-up, man-made, ugly and unnatural.”

Come May 2006, Woolcott and Smith’s Sanctuary not only won a coveted Chelsea gold medal from the judging panel of the Royal Horticultural Society but also the BBC RHS People’s Award for Best Small Garden. It struck a chord with visitors because it was a remembrance of things past.

“In place of grass, many ‘outdoor rooms’ have stone tiled floors that wouldn’t look out of place in the kitchen,” says Woolcott. “There are stainless-steel water features that would look more at home in expensive hotel bathrooms; angular plastic or hardwood seating better suited to corporate foyers, and concrete structures that wouldn’t get a second glance in a multi-storey car park.” As Smith adds, “There’s no room in these gardens for that accidental foxglove, your own personal hellebore cultivar, the chance of a mistletoe seed sprouting from a gnarled old fruit tree.”

At the end of days spent in schools, offices or factories, Woolcott and Smith want people to leave glass, concrete and plastic behind to unwind in a lush, green, flowery setting, “Somewhere that promotes positive feelings and gives a sense of being at one with nature,” says Woolcott. “Good gardens come with emotions attached,” continues Smith. “If they don’t reach out and touch you, then something’s wrong.”

Epping-born Woolcott has been gardening since the age of five, when his father gave him his own plot. Memories of his grandmother’s garden also still inspire him. “Although it had very neatly trimmed Seventies lawn edges, it was a random mix of fabulous colours,” he recalls. Countryside walks with his father encouraged a love of wild flowers, and he was impressed by the town park in Harlow. ‘There were massive herbaceous borders, huge rose beds, a hillside of flowering cherries, lilacs, witch hazel and heather.”

Rainham farmer’s son Smith was forever roaming the countryside, and often cycled to Queendown Warren, a protected area of chalk downland famed for rare native orchids. He especially recalls the bluebell woods in the village of Chilham, near Canterbury. “You walk up a steep track, which looks as if it leads to nowhere, then at the top you’re suddenly faced with something incredible, a carpet of blue for acres around. I liked to just sit there and take it all in.”

For Sanctuary, dandelions, docks, ground elder and such like from clients’ gardens – wild flowers or weeds, call them what you will – that would otherwise have been pulled up and composted were carefully dug out, potted on and nurtured for the show. Pieces of old church masonry, cobblestones, flints and bricks for the walls were borrowed from salvage yards and returned after use.

Based on a farmer’s wife’s once-cherished flower garden from the Forties, the Old Gate, Woolcott and Smith’s 2007 showpiece, had heritage vegetables overtaking neglected, weed-ridden herbaceous perennials during the Dig for Victory campaign. It again won Gold and the BBC Award, and was voted Best Courtyard Garden.

Their garden this year is sponsored by Good Gifts, a charity that empowers deprived and war-torn communities around the world by inviting those of us more fortunate to donate goats, chickens, wheelbarrows, beehives and all manner of simple things. Good Gifts Garden is a coastal feature with a bank of shrubs, wild flowers and grasses sloping down to a lapping rock pool by a sandy shore, complete with Fifties deckchair and other holiday paraphernalia. Wooden groynes contain it on three sides.

On the one hand it’s a doorstop-sandwich of childhood nostalgia, on the other it’s a showcase for the simple beauty of indigenous or naturalised species, which more and more of us should be growing, not only to preserve them in their own right, but also to provide havens for the wildlife dependent on them.

Equally, it’s about creating an environmentally friendly low-maintenance outdoor retreat, where feeding, watering and mulching go against the grain, using plants that have spent centuries quietly looking after themselves. Frinton-on-Sea is lending the boys a lorry-load of real beach sand. Windswept roadside broom plants have been lifted with permission and assistance from East Herts District Council. All will return home after their London holiday.

Most other species have been raised by British Wildflower Plants in Norfolk or grown from seed, so there’s been no depletion from the countryside. And the groynes forming the backdrop – they’re coming from the Wood Store in Brighton, which leads the field in rescuing, re-using and recycling waste timber from construction, demolition and manufacturing industries.

With luck, they’ll be going for gold again.

www.woolcottandsmith.com

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