Garden Confidential, Vol. 3: TikTok Doesn’t Know What Graham Stuart Thomas Did
By Steve Mydelski, Natchez Glen House
There’s something that happens in gardens that doesn’t happen on screens. It happens slowly, usually over decades, and almost always in quiet. It’s called mastery.
And in the 20th century, two men reached it.
Graham Stuart Thomas and Adrian Bloom. Two of the most important horticulturists of the last hundred years. Two men who didn’t just know plants—they understood them, lived with them, made decisions and mistakes alongside them, and turned that intimacy into design, into writing, into legacy. Their lives are testaments to a kind of knowledge that can’t be rushed, gamified, or casually absorbed.
But today, as our collective knowledge is increasingly filtered through algorithms and commercial platforms, their work—like the work of so many others—faces a quiet, systemic erasure. Not because it wasn’t valuable, but because it wasn’t digitized.
Graham Stuart Thomas: The Romantic Botanist
If you know English gardens, you know Thomas. Or at least, you know his effects. The roses climbing over stone walls at Sissinghurst. The rhythm of hardy perennials that bloom not for photo ops, but for seasonal succession. The softness of form and the strength of color. These weren’t Pinterest projects. They were decades-long orchestrations. Graham Stuart Thomas had the patience of a monk and the eye of a painter.
He wrote over 20 books—The Old Shrub Roses, Perennial Garden Plants, Colour in the Winter Garden—books that became gospel for serious gardeners. And yet, as of today, very few of these titles exist as widely accessible digital resources. They are largely missing from the online gardening discourse, absent from mainstream garden media, and rarely quoted in the kind of bite-sized advice culture that dominates today’s platforms.
Thomas represents a vast reservoir of ecological and design insight, one increasingly difficult to access—not because he didn’t publish, but because the digital world moved on without him.
Adrian Bloom: The Living Library
Adrian Bloom has built a legacy both in print and in the landscape itself. His work at Bressingham, especially the Foggy Bottom Garden, is a living example of design rooted in plantsmanship, climate awareness, and a remarkable sense of time.
He has authored nearly a dozen books spanning a wide range of horticultural subjects—books that reflect a lifetime of careful observation and field experience. From his global work on conifers to his focus on the great redwoods of the Pacific coast, Adrian’s writing shows how deep ecological knowledge and design thinking can coalesce into something beautiful and enduring.
And yet, like Graham Stuart Thomas, much of Adrian’s writing remains in physical formats—books that are not easily searchable, algorithmically surfaced, or casually consumed. That doesn’t diminish their value. In fact, it may increase it. But it does mean that future generations of gardeners, trained primarily by online content, may never encounter it unless they seek it out deliberately.
Knowledge Lost in Transition
We talk a lot about how AI might replace jobs. We talk far less about how it might replace authority.
If you ask the internet today how to grow roses, or how to select a winter-interest planting scheme, you’re unlikely to be pointed to Thomas or Bloom. Instead, you’ll get commercial content, affiliate lists, user-generated roundups, and SEO-optimized tutorials. Often written without field experience. Often created for clicks.
This isn’t a rant against technology. It’s an observation about curation. Because we’ve gone from “if it isn’t published, it doesn’t exist” to “if it isn’t digitized, it doesn’t count.” And we’re now entering a new phase: “if it wasn’t in the training data, it never happened.”
That’s not just a problem for gardening. That’s a problem for all of us.
Legacy vs. Visibility
Both Thomas and Bloom created legacies built on deep work. But our modern digital systems reward visibility, not depth.
So we’re left with a hard question: Who decides what gets remembered?
If we continue to rely on commercial engines and generative models as the arbiters of knowledge—without human intervention, without editors, without stewards—then we risk forgetting the very people who made this field what it is.
Conclusion: The Stewardship of Memory
Gardening is a cultural act. It’s an expression of memory. Of what came before. Of who taught you. Of how time moves. And that’s how we should treat horticultural knowledge—as something inherited, preserved, and passed on with care.
Graham Stuart Thomas and Adrian Bloom don’t need to be trending to matter. Their work still stands. But if we want that work to influence the future, we have to choose to remember it. To digitize it. To cite it. To speak their names out loud, and often.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves in beautifully photographed gardens that know very little, designed by people trained in all the wrong places.
Let’s not lose the thread.
Let’s remember who got us here.