Slow Down: Darren Hawkes on Designing Gardens That Hold You

There is a particular quality of attention that a good garden demands. Not the focused, purposeful attention of a to-do list, but something closer to its opposite — a soft, open awareness that arrives almost without you noticing. Darren Hawkes knows this feeling well. Seated on a steep Cornish hillside, the garden dropping away toward the sea below, he describes it with the directness of someone who has spent a career trying to design it into existence.

"Being in touch with nature, with the soil, with plants, being surrounded by birdsong and insect life — it's immediately transformative," he says, clicking his fingers. "It brings you into the present. Like that."

Who Is Darren Hawkes?

Darren Hawkes is one of Britain's most thoughtful and quietly celebrated landscape and garden designers. Based on the south Cornish coast, he has been designing gardens for over two decades — domestic, commercial, and public realm projects across the UK — and has shown at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show multiple times, earning Gold and Silver-Gilt medals along the way. His 2023 Samaritans Listening Garden drew widespread acclaim for its sensitivity and emotional intelligence, creating a space designed to offer solace to people in distress. He is also a visiting tutor at the London College of Garden Design and hosts The Garden Design Confessional, a podcast in which he explores design stories and creative processes with leading names in landscape architecture.

In a few short weeks, Hawkes returns to the main stage at Chelsea with what may be his most ambitious and resonant project yet: The Lady Garden Foundation 'Silent No More' Garden, designed in association with the Lady Garden Foundation, a national women's health charity raising awareness of gynaecological cancers. The garden takes inspiration from the 20th-century Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whose work explores voids and negative space, and features five sculptures representing the five gynaecological cancers. Stone-limed paths lead into a sunken central area where water spills from a pool into deep rills, and planting draws from a warm Mediterranean palette — soft pinks, silver greys, glaucous foliage — to evoke calm and connection. It is a garden designed to make people stop, look, and talk.  

Keep It Fluid

When Hawkes talks about what guides him in shaping a landscape, the language is sensory and instinctive rather than technical. One principle returns again and again: fluidity.

"Keep your layout fluid. Keep pathways fluid," he says. "It creates a greater sense of space and is much gentler on the eye."

It is a deceptively simple idea. Rigid, angular paths impose a logic on a garden — they tell you where to go and how fast to get there. Curved, fluid paths do something different. They slow you down. They invite you to look sideways, to notice what is growing at the edge, to follow the line of a hedge or the dip of a slope rather than cutting across it. In a garden that slips toward the sea, as Hawkes's Cornish setting does, that fluidity becomes almost inevitable — the landscape itself is already in motion, and the design simply follows.

The Right Chair, at the Right Height

A garden, for Hawkes, is not complete without the right place to sit. And he is precise about what that means — not in an overly technical way, but in the way of someone who has thought carefully about the relationship between body, chair, and landscape.

"A good chair in a garden has to be the right height," he says. "Not too high, definitely not too low — but probably a little bit lower. Like half an inch, an inch lower than a dining chair, so that you can really rest."

That small difference in height is everything. A dining chair keeps you upright, alert, ready to act. A garden chair, set fractionally lower, shifts the body into a different register — one of ease, of settling, of having nowhere else to be. It is the physical equivalent of the garden itself: a space that gently removes the urgency from the day.

The Kelso Rocking Chair

The chair that caught Hawkes's eye — and that visitors may find at his Chelsea show garden — is the Munder Skiles Kelso Rocking Chair, a piece from the brand's wood collection that he describes as something he has wanted to use for a long time.

"There's a sort of playful quality of rocking," he says, "but it just suggests a much slower pace. You're going to take time to rock back and forth and find your optimum angle."

The Kelso sits within Munder Skiles' tradition of beautifully proportioned, artisanally crafted outdoor furniture — pieces built using historically researched methods, designed to offer maximum comfort without the need for cushions, and made to last. The rocking chair adds something that most garden furniture cannot offer: movement. Not the restless movement of someone who wants to leave, but the rhythmic, self-regulating movement of someone who has arrived. Rock forward, rock back, find your angle. The garden does the rest.

Presence as Design Intention

What runs through everything Hawkes says is a conviction that the best garden design is, at its core, about returning people to themselves. The birdsong, the insect life, the fluid path, the chair set at just the right height — none of it is incidental. It is all in service of the same thing: the moment when you stop thinking about where you need to be next and simply notice where you are.

"It brings you into the present," he says again. "Like that."

At Chelsea this May, on one of the most watched stages in the horticultural world, Darren Hawkes will attempt to do exactly that — for every visitor who walks through the Silent No More Garden and pauses, even briefly, to feel it.