"My garden might look weedy to some, but I’m not bothered" says designer Tom Massey

We caught up with Tom Massey, author of Waterwise Garden: Sustain Your Garden Through Drought and Flood about his new book, his current reads, favourite landscape and more.

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What’s your new book about? It is about creating beautiful, resilient gardens that use water more thoughtfully. It draws on more than a decade of design work and research, written in collaboration with the brilliant RHS science team, and offers practical advice, planting palettes and case studies. At its heart, it’s about rethinking how we value, protect and preserve water in our gardens and beyond.

What did you learn from writing it? That waterwise gardening isn’t about restriction or compromise – it’s about creativity. It’s about reading your site, understanding the flow of water and recognising opportunities for storage, whether in tanks, butts or passive gravity-fed systems like rain gardens, swales or ephemeral ponds.

Working with the RHS science team gave me a deeper appreciation of how much can be achieved with thoughtful plant choices, echoing the mantra ‘right plant, right place, right purpose’. And I realised how small shifts can add up to a huge impact.

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What one piece of advice would you share from the book? Collect rainwater. It is transformative. Storing water when it’s abundant and using it when it’s scarce is one of the most effective steps gardeners can take, and there are solutions for every scale and budget.

I’ll read anything about... I’ve been diving into the world of consciousness – exploring fascinating new research that landscapes and plants might be more ‘alive’ than we imagine. Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke the Plant is waiting on my shelf. Her early work on the possibility of plant perception and memory is deeply fascinating.

What I’m reading right now Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (the illustrated edition). It’s an extraordinary exploration of the magical world of fungi, with words and imagery that are as evocative as they are enlightening.

What first sparked your interest in garden design? Growing up, I was always outside, with a strong sense of how landscapes could shape how you feel. Later, I realised garden design was a way to bring together creativity, research and science, and care for the environment.

Waterwise gardening isn’t about restriction or compromise – it’s about creativity

What is your own garden like? It is a tiny urban courtyard, really a testing ground – full of RHS Chelsea leftovers and experimental plantings. It’s very shady, and because it had a thick poured-concrete surface, we had to use raised planters. It’s limiting, but in some ways I enjoy working within those constraints. At the same time, I’m exploring the possibility of buying land with a group of friends – a space to be more experimental and to try larger-scale plantings.

Most memorable gardening mistake? Planting without fully understanding the site, especially the soil. I learned the hard way that soil comes first in every project. Now, for larger schemes, we work with specialists like Tim O’Hare Associates to really understand what’s happening beneath the surface. Soil holds enormous potential; treated the right way it becomes a vast sponge, storing water and helping to mitigate so many of the challenges our gardens face.

Collect rainwater. It is transformative.

What’s your guilty gardening secret? I’m a bit lazy – I like looser, wilder aesthetics and enjoy seeing what blows in. My garden might look a bit ‘weedy’ to some, but I’m not too bothered.

Favourite garden or landscape to visit Great Dixter always inspires: the dynamism, the bold planting combinations, the sense of constant experimentation. The south-west coast of Cornwall has a raw energy, where land meets sea, that always pulls me back to why I love this work.

What else are you up to at the moment? I’m working with a brilliant team led by Studio Weave on redesigning the entrances and arrivals at the British Museum, alongside creating new garden spaces. The project connects horticultural and material stories with more than two million years of human history.

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