In the film Love, Actually, an aged rock star, played by Bill Nighy, created a cultural moment. “Yes I have, Ant or Dec . . . ” he quips in response to the pair of British television presenters. The joke was that Ant or Dec were so alike and seen so often together that many could not tell one from the other. So it is for anyone in the world of agro-ecological gardening and farming who has crossed the path of Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy. Known as The Land Gardeners, the two women not only share a background as barristers, careers as garden designers and a mission to communicate the wonder and importance of soil with those who still think of it only as dirt, they also wear the same clothes.
Courtauld and Elworthy founded The Land Gardeners in 2012. Initially a cut-flower-growing business with a focus on soil health, the company has expanded to encompass garden design, publishing, workshops and, crucially, a not-for-profit educational platform for sharing their extensive research on soil health. Their reputation for the latter now sees them co-curating a three-month exhibition at London’s Somerset House. Titled Soil: The World at our Feet, it features more than 50 works by contemporary artists, from film to sculpture, as well as historical artefacts and contributions from scientists. Its mission is to explore and celebrate the power and potential of soil. The world at their feet indeed.
“It started outside the nursery gate,” Courtauld explains of their matching work uniform. “Our children were wearing smocks and so we had our own made.” Both had pivoted from law into postgraduate diplomas on garden design. But the synergy happened when Elworthy hosted her daughter’s third birthday party. Where most mothers send guests home with cake, she sent hers off with a book about compost. Courtauld still has hers.
For Elworthy, the lightbulb moment had come back on her farm in her native New Zealand in 2004, when the enormity of climate change dawned on her. “It felt paralysing,” she says, “but my thought was if we could get the soil right, everything would go from there.”
Back in the UK, the women held meetings in cafés, writing plans on paper tablecloths. Courtauld has kept these too. In 2014, she wrote a note that could have found its way into the speech that Steve Reed, the UK’s environment secretary, made at the Oxford Farming Conference just a few weeks ago: “This is an unsustainable future for farming — we need farms and gardens that sustain both soil and body.”
Their gardening collaboration began within the walled garden of Elworthy’s home at Wardington Manor in Oxfordshire. Previously a working yard — “mostly for burning rubbish” — the soil was “lifeless”. They restored it, experimenting with homemade compost and techniques such as mixed planting and cover cropping: “tulips grown with field beans, then planting cosmos into it followed by phacelia”. Plants were not grouped off. Instead they grew “herbs alongside vegetables, cut flowers and fruit” all together. This, says Courtauld, was key: “Diversity above ground means diversity below ground.”
Nature responded with growth that was, says Elworthy, “almost frightening”. As the soil transformed, the plants became shiny with more plasticity: “They began to move like hair in a Wella advert.” They found themselves with “great armfuls of sweet peas, 20cm-50cm long. There were no problems with pests and disease. They flowered for longer in the vase. We thought: we’re on to something here.”
A successful cut-flower business followed, but it was more than the sum of its parts. “The flowers were the way in. The beacon that attracted everyone,” says Elworthy. They gave tours and talks about growing “but 10 minutes in we were talking about soil”.
More experiments followed. “We were just mixing potions,” says Courtauld. “We had kids’ goggles on, long coats, stirring mixtures we’d made because we’d been to see [sustainable agriculture expert] Eugenio Gras working with biofertilisers.” It was not just the results that motivated them. “We were exploring,” says Courtauld, “and to do that we had to get our hands in the soil rather than sitting in a studio, which was much more interesting.”
They thought they were just experimenting; searching for solutions and weaving them into their horticulture business. But when scientists started to visit, Courtauld says “we knew we had to start taking it seriously”.
The pair began to move their ideas out into nearby parks and farms to enhance biodiversity. On one farm where the initial plan was to plant forestry, for example, they have planted mixed swaths of truffle oaks along side alleys of walnuts and hazelnuts, bordered with hawthorn, dog roses, elderflowers, cherries, sea buckthorn and blackthorn.
The name The Land Gardeners was partly a nod to their focus on gardening the land rather than plants; partly to wartime Land Girls and characters like Beatrix Havergal, who, Elworthy explains, “led an amazing education of women in horticulture”. The pair have now worked on nearly 60 gardens from England to Italy.
Architect Ben Pentreath, who has worked with them on multiple projects including one in Cornwall and another for shoe designer Charlotte Dellal, says their pioneering approach is founded in “the radical connection between soil, food, nature and the meaning of a garden that is the antithesis to a culture obsessed with visual effects and instant results”. Karen Spencer, who enlisted The Land Gardeners’ help with the restoration of a 12-acre walled garden on the Althorp estate in Northamptonshire, says “their genius lies in combining a scientific approach to soil with the art of creating enduring beauty. It’s the kind you can feel when you step into the garden.”
Their research has led them to visit pioneering growers around the world, from Cuba to India, returning to a lab in Wiltshire to apply what they have learnt. In 2021 they launched a climate compost — “really an inoculum”, they explain — and more recently, tonics. “There is no silver bullet,” warns Courtauld. “Feeding the soil is a dance with the soils and inputs you have and the resources you have available. But there is so much to learn; it is really exciting.” Their science-geek side has paid off in hard evidence. Soil tests taken from Wardington’s walled garden show “we raised the soil organic matter from 5 per cent to 12-15 per cent in 10 years”.
In 2020’s lockdown, a kitchen table conversation with the artist Nancy Cadogan became a book, Soil to Table. Blending recipes from chef Lulu Cox with Cadogan’s paintings, it interwove a history of soil with explanations of the importance of microbes and compost with glossy pictures. In doing so, it reached a new audience: “There were people coming to our courses who never would have before.” The women became convinced that art had a role to play in their mission; as Courtauld puts it, “We needed to create a link between the rigour of science and the awe of beauty.”
Their target was Somerset House. After spending two months researching artists working with soil they prepared a pitch, and found themselves pushing at an open door.
“Our programme is anchored in contemporary issues of our time,” says Claire Catterall, senior curator at Somerset House, who, along with May Rosenthal Sloan, has co-curated Soil with The Land Gardeners. “Soil is so important, yet so little understood. Bringing together a diverse powerhouse of artists lets us offer solutions that imagine a better future, but also make it magical, as soil itself is.”
The exhibition is divided into three themed sections: Life Below Ground, Life Above Ground and Hope. Its stated ambition is to illustrate soil’s role as a “great interconnector, making all life on Earth possible, and its crucial relationship particularly to human civilisation”. Fragility and environmental destruction are inevitably represented in the exhibits; but so are inspiration and optimism. That, says Elworthy, is the power of art: “It can deal with subjects we haven’t quite got to yet: looking at them from a different perspective. It can tackle things which are uncomfortable.”
The statistics about soil make for uncomfortable reading. A combination of changing climate and land management has meant a third of the world’s soils are now degraded, a process which is accelerating, eroding soil at a rate of four football fields a second. Leaving aside climate consequences, for a global population that grows 95 per cent of its food in soil, this is a problem. This is what motivates Courtauld and Elworthy to take the lessons they’ve learnt beyond the garden: an exhibition tour and Soil & the Land Gardeners, their non-profit platform where gardeners, growers and farmers can share techniques, are brewing alongside the microbes. “We’re not saying we’ve got all the answers,” says Courtauld. “But we are saying: let’s all share this collective knowledge so we can find some.”
Working together so closely may mean the two women have created their own “Ant or Dec” effect. But it has also made them a powerful force for communicating the message that an answer to today’s polycrises might lie under our feet.
“Soil: The World at our Feet”, Somerset House, London, until April 13; somersethouse.org.uk
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