For his final major project as an undergraduate studying Animation at AUB, Tom Massey made a rotoscope film of his elderly grandfather reading the John Masefield poem, Sea-Fever. The poem is a paean to living life on your own terms and captures the joy and freedom of travel, where change is the only constant.
This seems entirely appropriate for an educational journey and a career that is characterised by reinvention. So, when award-winning landscape designer, Tom Massey, suggested that we conduct this interview in the depths of Cornwall, I jumped at the chance. By any account, his journey from animation to landscape design is an unusual career path, and I couldn’t wait to understand how it had evolved – but the prospect of doing this in the landscape that since childhood had inspired him, in high summer, was too good to miss.
The photographer, Bill Bradshaw, also an AUB alumnus, and I, arranged to meet Tom by a farmgate on a quiet Cornish lane in the Roseland Peninsula. We had followed Tom’s instructions but both of us were beginning to think we had gone wrong when we rounded a bend and saw him. We pulled over, introduced ourselves and set off on a clifftop path, the azure Atlantic sparkling below the beetling cliffs.
So how does an animator become a garden designer? The journey was more complicated than I thought…
After a false start studying conventional academic A Levels, Tom had dropped out of Esher College and took a job for six months working as a labourer with a landscape gardener. An art Foundation followed where he discovered animation, this led him to enrol on the BA (Hons) Animation Production degree at AUB:
“[At AUB] we did a lot of observational and life drawing as well as learning about traditional animation techniques. This really encouraged me to engage with and study the landscape and people in the landscape. But what I think I liked the most was the creative side of animation, imagining a world, developing a narrative, telling a story and setting a mood or an atmosphere through the medium of animation and film."
After AUB, Tom started freelancing, doing animation jobs for advertising agencies “mainly digital, using Maya, which is the software that we learned on the course. So I got that whole grounding in using computer aided design software...” But something was missing, he missed making things for himself, and also making something physical and tangible “so I quickly realised it wasn’t really what I wanted to do long-term… but a lot of what I learned from the course could be transferred into other occupations, that’s when I started to think about what I could do, that would be a longterm career. And that led me to start thinking again about landscape design.”
By this time, now in a long-term relationship, Tom and his partner had taken on a lease on a warehouse in Hackney and converted it into a co-working space for people working in creative industries… “it had a nice community feel. And we had a small garden space at the front. We didn’t have much money, so we just used whatever we could find to knock up some planters and designed it on a shoestring budget. And the design of the interiors, we did all that on a real shoestring too. But I really enjoyed that whole process of designing and then seeing it built, creating something real and physical, then seeing people use it and enjoy it.”
Far from his animation training being irrelevant to this new interest in 3D space design, Tom naturally started designing physical spaces, using similar CAD software. “My animation training was really useful for designing. Or just being able to sketch something out to show this is what we could do, let’s try this. So that’s where I realised that the animation training would actually be really useful for a career in landscape design.”
Now 28, Tom thought that the moment had come to harness the interdisciplinary skills he had learned. “Me and my wife sold our shares in the co-working business and I used literally all of my money, all my savings, to fund doing a year diploma course in garden design (at the London College of Garden Design). I took a bit of a risk on it really, just to say, actually, I’m going to do this and just go for it.”
Following the diploma Tom worked for two years with his tutor, landscape designer Andrew Wilson, and his partner Gavin McWilliam, who both had more traditional training as a landscape architects. At that point, Tom knew he had a lot to learn, particularly about plants, and hard landscaping, but found his strength was the “conceptual side of garden design and the realisation of the concept.”
His training as an animator “translated really well into designing landscapes, particularly show gardens, where you need to have a concept or a theme. So I started out doing the RHS shows, and that is where the client is either a charity or a brand that has a story that they need to tell. And the medium of your storytelling is plants and landscape and creating emotion through that physical space. I found that process very rewarding, drawing a design on a computer or on paper and then seeing that turn into 3D physical space. And to see it come to life and actually plant physical plants and then watch people walk through it and see how they respond or react emotionally to that space was a great experience.”
Tom’s work as a landscape designer cannot be easily categorised – rather each garden is characterised by the stories he tells through it for his clients. Whether that be creating a “border control” inspired garden for the UNHCR that used concrete and razor wire alongside plants – “Obviously border control is referring to borders of countries but also the way that we in this country are very obsessive about the plants that grow in our garden borders. The design used a metaphor of native and non-native plants to represent residents and refugees.”
Or his recent award-winning Chelsea Garden for the Royal Entomological Society (RES) that highlighted the vital but endangered contribution of insects to ecosystems, biodiversity and supporting wildlife in general, including mankind – “the garden allowed RES to tell a story and used horticulture to showcase how gardens and insects interact. It created a dialogue, between entomologists and gardeners and to give the charity a brilliant platform to get their work known to a wider audience.”
Tom is also a recently published author, his first book ‘RHS Resilient Garden’ talks about how gardeners can come together and react to the challenges of climate change.
"A weed is not a plant growing in the wrong place. It’s actually a plant growing in exactly the right place because it’s seeded itself there and it’s probably doing very well. You might try and plant something else that might fail, but we’re going to need to learn to be more accepting of weeds because the way the climate is changing, the way that our landscapes are shifting, the vegetation is going to change quite quickly in this country and in all countries across the world. It’s going to look very different in 50 years, Cornwall will look different from how it looks today.”
If I had to ask your one piece of advice for the next generation of creatives, what would it be?
“I think for people thinking about or studying in a creative field, I guess it’s important, to find what you really want to do, to be willing to be adaptable and experiment. I think what I found though doing the art Foundation, the animation BA, then doing bits of building and construction and the time I worked with a landscaper – they are all important. Just taking a wide pool of inspiration from all parts of your life and then working out how you can best channel that into something that is creative and fulfilling and allows you to achieve what you want to do. Not being afraid to just park something and switch to something else and see if it works, that’d be my piece of advice."
"Don’t ever be afraid to just stop doing what you’re doing if it isn’t working out for you. Try something else, and maybe that will be the thing that really resonates with you… I think you never get to a point of knowing everything. You’re always learning."
