LONG BEFORE “CURB APPEAL” ENTERED THE MODERN VOCABULARY, OWNERS OF GREAT HISTORICAL ESTATES UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL: A HOME IS NOT MERELY ITS WALLS AND CEILINGS. THE SURROUNDING LANDSCAPE IS ITS FIRST IMPRESSION, ITS PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENT AND OFTEN ITS MOST EXTRAVAGANT INVESTMENT.
English estates employed landscape architects with the same seriousness as the finest interior craftsmen. Gardens also carried deep symbolism. Tudor knot gardens declared family loyalty, while 18th-century English landscape gardens embedded temples, grottos and inscribed urns as philosophical journeys through classical literature and Enlightenment ideals.
The greatest historical properties shared one defining quality: a commitment to unity between building and grounds. Architects conceived the house and landscape as a single composition. The view from a window was designed as deliberately as the room itself. What those builders never forgot, and the modern era largely has, is that the land surrounding a home is the home.
Today, owners of historical homes spend considerable time and money restoring the interiors. The plaster, millwork, wide-plank floors and period hardware are attended to with the kind of care that historical architecture demands. Too often, the outside is forgotten, and the landscape falls into disrepair, becoming generic, approximate and out of harmony. This is a problem that Alex Smith has spent his entire career solving, and the remarkable fact, for anyone who has searched elsewhere for this kind of expertise, is that he has been doing it right here in Atlanta for more than 25 years.
Smith is a garden designer with a classical education that most practitioners in this country simply do not have, one shaped by two of the most consequential figures in late 20th-century garden design. That education combined with his deep knowledge of plants, architecture and the specific conditions of the American South make him a rare resource for the owners of houses that deserve more than a cookie-cutter landscape plan.
Smith grew up in a family of gardeners, with a grandmother and father who took plants seriously. He studied landscape design at the Art Institute of Atlanta but wasn’t all that inspired by what he was seeing. A turning point came when he attended a lecture and found himself watching Ryan Gainey hold a room. Gainey, who is internationally renowned and was the recipient of numerous design awards, was among the most original garden designers working in America—a man whose work wove together art, architecture, horticulture and history. The encounter changed Smith.
“That’s when the light bulb went off,” he says.
Smith joined Gainey’s practice and stayed for eight and a half years, working across the eastern United States on projects that required the kind of thinking that historical properties demand: sensitivity to architectural character, command of period-appropriate planting and an understanding of how a garden earns its relationship to a house. It was a rigorous apprenticeship, and it opened a door that took Smith’s education across the ocean.
Through Gainey, Smith came to know the work of Rosemary Verey, the legendary English gardener who had made Barnsley House in Gloucestershire into one of the most studied and admired private gardens in the world. Verey’s gardens were models of classical structure and botanical intelligence, and serious designers traveled from every corner of the globe to see them. A young Smith asked Gainey whether he thought it would ever be possible to work there.
“He encouraged me to write her a letter,” Smith recalls. “She replied and invited me to work at Barnsley for the summer and stay in her cottage. I worked there for two summers in a row, and on the weekends, she’d pay me my small salary, give me the keys to her car and tell me what gardens to go see.”
Those weekends produced a kind of knowledge that can’t be acquired in a classroom. Verey understood, better than almost anyone of her generation, how a garden should belong to its house, how structure gives a landscape its bones, how the planting fills it with life and character, and how all of it should feel, in the end, as though it grew there naturally, rather than having been installed.
This is precisely the sensibility that Atlanta’s historical properties deserve. An older house, whether an antebellum estate in Buckhead, a 1920s Italianate villa in Brookhaven or a colonial revival in Sandy Springs, carries an architectural logic that extends past its walls. A landscape designed without that awareness can diminish the whole property, even when the planting itself is handsome. These homes need a designer who reads architecture the way a scholar reads text, who understands which forms, materials and plants are appropriate to a period and a place, and who has the horticultural knowledge to source and establish them properly.
“I look at the architectural style of the house first,” Smith says. “And I’m very influenced by the collaboration with clients; I listen to what they say. People know me as an avid plantsman. I have such a passion for plants, and I’ve been doing it so long that we’re revered for our planting knowledge and combinations.”
Founded in 1999, Alex Smith Garden Design Ltd. operates from a headquarters in Chamblee, just north of Buckhead, where an acre-and-a-half property serves as both studio and living demonstration of the firm’s work. The grounds include a restored 1920s Arts and Crafts cottage, a greenhouse, wildflower meadow, vegetable gardens and plantings that change with the seasons, an extraordinary resource for clients who want to see possibilities before committing to them. And, it has chickens.
The firm also maintains a 3-acre mountain facility near Scaly, just north of Highlands, North Carolina, complete with stone walls and curated plantings. The firm’s work has extended across 15 states, but the main footprint is Atlanta and across Georgia to Sea Island, Lake Burton, Hawkins Island and Butler Plantation in South Georgia, as well as into North Carolina and beyond.
Its services are comprehensive: garden design and landscape design, hardscaping and site planning, custom water features, edible gardens, patio and pool surrounds, and full project management through every phase. The company operates as a design-build firm, handling the construction of what it designs and applying the same standards of care to installation that inform its designs. A selective maintenance practice rounds out the offering, though Smith is deliberate about what he designs and for whom.
“My designs are only as good as how they’re built and maintained,” he says. “We want projects we can do right and clients who buy into the projects and can take care of them.”
Today, the firm has grown entirely through reputation, with clients arriving most often through referrals from architects, interior designers and other homeowners who have seen the work firsthand. Clients who come looking for Smith understand, or have been told by someone who does, that the combination of classical training, botanical expertise and architectural sensitivity he brings is not easy to find anywhere, let alone at home in Georgia.
For anyone who has inherited or acquired a house with real architectural character and has wondered what to do with the ground it stands on, there’s one essential thing to know: The person best equipped to answer that question has spent decades preparing for it, trained by two of the greatest garden designers of the modern era and, remarkably, is working right here in Atlanta. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
