Digging Around with Sean Anthony Pritchard
Designer and author Sean Anthony Pritchard invites into his cottage cabinet of garden curiosities
Digging Around is back! In this week’s episode of this occasional series, we’re Digging Around with the garden designer and author Sean Anthony Pritchard, finding out what has inspired him on his gardening journey.
This week, Sean has released his debut book Outside In, an exploration of an increasingly blurred boundary between the garden and the home at Sean’s cottage in Somerset. The book travels through the year offering advice and personal insight on what to grow when, and how, at all times, there is something thrilling that the garden can offer the inside space.
As soon as I opened this book, I couldn't stop racing through the exquisite photos and words which invite and transport you into the author's beautiful home, another world with details and ideas that you want to bring back with you. There's a touch of magic on every page - the cheer of tulips... the simple complexities of narcissi... the mysterious shades and tones of Benton irises. As much a good read as a gorgeous pictorial journey through the year, both in the house and out, this book is utterly beautiful and totally inspirational, written in a way that fills the reader with confidence at the same time as enchanting them.
The garden has had a profound impact on my ability to soothe the stresses and overthinking that plagues the everyday. It teaches me, constantly, to live in the moment; to appreciate the here and now, and to be grounded in the scents and colours that it offers in this moment.
Sean, when did gardening arrive for you?
For many years, gardening was something I did only in my head. After leaving university I moved to London and lived in flats across town that had no outside space, and a garden was something I really yearned for. At that stage, it wasn’t necessarily about wanting to grow all my favourite plants and flowers, it was more about just having a plot of earth that I could escape to and call my own. I learnt a lot about myself during this time; I don’t do well when I can’t feel some sort of connection to nature and the outside world every day. Even in town, I need to feel as though plants and birds and water and air are never far away.
I grew up in a pretty standard suburban town and my parent’s had a decent sized garden but weren’t particularly garden enthusiasts. My grandfather was more interested in growing, and every year he experimented with different sweet pea varieties. My earliest gardening memories are of those sweet peas and their intoxicating scent that perfumed the summer afternoons when I’d visit.
I’ll never forget the feeling of when I bought my cottage in Somerset and finally had my