Lifestyle
22/07/2026
Earlier this summer, our co-founder, Corey, had the pleasure of visiting The Serge Hill Project; an innovative not-for-profit initiative founded by Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith on the site of an old apple orchard in Bedmond, Hertfordshire.
From these exquisite surroundings, the Stuart-Smiths have developed a meaningful community programme worthy of celebration and wider imitation, based on the understanding that working with nature can radically transform people’s lives; gardening as a means of creative therapy and social inclusion, among its many other benefits.
Here, Corey gives us a short insight into her day there, the healing powers of the gardens and the structures dispersed within them:
‘The Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health, as it’s more formally known, was founded as a Community Interest Company in 2023 and draws on Sue’s work as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book, The Well Gardened Mind, and Tom’s horticultural expertise as an internationally renowned Landscape Architect.
As a keen gardener myself, I have procrastinated for far too long in getting myself out there to experience what is in equal measures, an impressive, honourable and necessary enterprise. So, with mum and sister in tow, I made my way to this astonishing oasis just off the M1, within the Green Belt of St Alban’s City.
Amidst the sumptuous landscaping, beds and gardens are an intriguing combination of historic and contemporary buildings. To the south of the site is Tom’s childhood home: a grand, elegant Queen-Anne style manor house, huge and white, with a cast-iron veranda and sprawling streams of climbing roses. It also has the most magical walled garden, more formally arranged beds and a Victorian greenhouse full of geraniums.
I was particularly excited to see first hand, The Apple House. For those that don’t already know, The Apple House was the winner of a 2026 RIBA East Award (its clients, Tom and Sue, were fittingly named the region’s ‘Client of the Year’ too). Just to add to the overall poetry of all this, it was designed by the couple’s son, Ben Stuart-Smith in conjunction with multi-disciplinary design collective, Okra Studio.
It’s a materially innovative, year-round community hub providing shelter to and a base for more of the Project’s education and wellbeing incentives. These extend to professional and public participation in horticulture and environmental stewardships, and collaborations with local schools, youth groups, mental health charities, residents and designers.
The building itself rests beautifully in its surroundings and is constructed using several locally sourced natural materials, including a glulam timber structure, hempcrete walls, rustic cleft-oak cladding and an unfired clay floor, which was sourced nearby.
From inside, through the high glazing, you look out onto sections of the Plant Library, which is laid out in a grid system and self-irrigating; planted in a foot of sharp sand and with predominantly drought-tolerant herbaceous plants – two thousand in all with around five hundred different bulbs. A consideration for us all in the near and further afar! It’s a controlled but beautifully messy affair, and made me have to restrain myself from attempting to squeeze even more varieties into my little London garden.
Tom’s family home is The Barn. You can walk in and around its various gardens. The courtyard has several wonderful water features and some pleasing use of corten steel; a material we often see in Tom’s landscape projects. And the West Garden has topiaries, hundreds of perennials, gigantic alliums, conjuring a sea of purple flowers and a mecca for biodiversity. There’s also a nursery on site where you (not I) can buy some of the many species on display.
Before I say too much about a place that can’t be written about, only experienced, I convey this merely to encourage you all to take the time to visit and support this brilliant cause. Walking around the gardens, sitting quietly in the meditative spaces and appreciating the calmness that comes with a natural environment like this, it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing against the clear benefits that can come with gardening. Hands in the soil, the surrounding scents, the life that’s bred and the sense of achievement that comes from creating produce. These are the things that we cannot afford to lose or forget in an increasingly urban society.
Go and be inspired.’
