Dame Sylvia Crowe. Image: Banbury Guardian
Dame Sylvia Crowe was a celebrated landscape architect and garden designer. From the mid-1960s she worked at the Forestry Commission as an advisor, and contributed significant and innovative approaches to forest planning, management and design which proved not just influential but essential, and are still in use today.
““Landscaping is often what you leave out, not what you put in. You need absolute simplicity to knit the landscape back again.” ”
In many ways, Crowe is responsible for today’s visitor-centred approach to forests. Few people did more to promote and reimagine the role of forests as places of relaxation, rest and recreation. A pioneer in an era that saw few women in positions of influence, she also blazed a trail for women in forestry.
EARLY LIFE
Born in England in 1901, her parents ran a fruit farm. Crowe had a childhood bout with tuberculosis, which gave her time away from school to explore her local woodlands. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion for nature, and in 1922 she graduated from Swanley Horticultural College. Working for a landscaping business, she learned surveying, and worked in their nursery. Famously, in 1936 she was awarded the Gold Medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for her garden, which to this day is considered innovative for her creative use of concrete.
A talented landscape artist, eventually her talents as a designer led her into the field of landscape planning. Following World War Two, her career continued to blossom. She contributed innovative, beautiful designs to plans for new towns, roads and forestry throughout the UK.
A PIONEER OF MINIMALISM
A proponent of minimalism in architecture and landscaping, Crowe pioneered a number of common sense but innovative techniques, such as using excess soil dug up during the building of towns to create flowing hills, on which she planted native trees. These techniques still influence garden design to this day. She became President of the Institute of Landscape Architects (later the Landscape Institute) in 1957, staying in the post for two years.
Crowe’s influence can still be powerfully felt. Over her lifetime she published 11 books, including Forestry in the Landscape (with Zvi Miller, HMSO, 1966), and Garden Design, which is still used as a textbook today in academic and practical courses, and by contemporary planners and designers.
She travelled internationally, masterminding projects in both the UK and the US, helping to create practical, beautiful designs for reservoirs, hospitals, universities and more.
REIMAGINING THE FOREST
Crowe became the first ever Landscape Advisor for the Forestry Commission in 1963. She had a deep conviction that forests could be places enjoyment, and destinations used for recreation. While this was a more general leisure trend in the 1960s, Crowe’s special vision was to reimagine the mostly commercial forests and rugged trails that the Commission looked after at the time as places that could be designed, artfully using the contours of landscapes to guide tree planting and forest planning. “Landscaping is often what you leave out, not what you put in,” she is reported to have said. “You need absolute simplicity to knit the landscape back again.”
“The landscape architect has to understand what the people want and to understand what the wild life wants, as well as understanding the function of whatever it is you are undertaking. There is a great deal to think about…”
The influence of her thinking on the approach to forestry was profound. Recreation, conservation, landscape design and even rural employment became matters of policy, rather than subsidiary concerns of the forestry sector.
She advocated passionately for balancing commercial needs against impacts on landscape and wildlife, an approach that was decades ahead of its time. Model forests she produced were celebrated for their innovation and simplicity.
A LASTING LEGACY
Awarded the CBE in 1967, Crowe left the Forestry Commission in 1976, going on to help found the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Former Forestry Commission advisor Johanna Gibbons writes of Crowe:
“Her modest disposition belied a formidable international reputation held by few other professionals in the field, then or since… Her diminutive figure, neat and practical dress and quiet infectious enthusiasm for the landscape impressed me enormously as we took walks together through the landscape. At the time, there were not many women who’d independently forged such a successful professional career, who could be looked up to as a role model.”
Dame Sylvia Crowe passed away in 1997, leaving behind a legacy that truly helped to redefine what the Forestry Commission was, and what it would become. The Landscape Institute, in their biography, sum up the power of her lasting, all-encompassing influence:
“One of the most remarkable characteristics of her work is that she handled landscapes of hugely diverse scales, from small garden details to hundreds of acres of new towns, forestry and reservoir margins… With each project she always showed acute awareness of context. In her drawings her contribution to schemes appears predominantly in terms of planting, but these drawings do not fully reflect the influence she had already exerted on the projects, persuading interdisciplinary teams to recognise the significance of views, landform and local character in determining the location and impact of new interventions in the landscape.”
An artist, a pioneer and a champion of the natural world, Dame Crowe deserves to be remembered as one of the most important figures in the history of British forestry.