“We are all Head Gardeners of the planet.” G Smith, 23/11/2024
Unconventional, chaotic, organic, and full of love, Greg Smith was an artist, painter, musician, DJ, gardener, botanist, environmentalist, aquarist, educator, helper, anarchist, psychonaut, hill walker, climber, brother, son, & friend.
More than all this, he was a deeply sensitive human being who possessed a strong, humanistic empathy with the people and the world around him.
Growing up in Southend-on-Sea, he was the oldest of four to three younger sisters whom he adored. Family trips were taken in their father’s vintage black London taxi, siblings swapping tapes and walkman batteries to drown the noise of the rattling old cab. On walking holidays to Wales, Greg would practically run up mountains, always in front, always one or two corners ahead, out of sight, eager to see what lay ahead. Then at the summit, sitting, deep in his thoughts, taking in the surrounding views. This was a happy place, and where he would return in later years to climb and push himself to his physical limits on the rock faces of Snowdonia.
At Southend High School for Boys, his raw talent and high octane ways found safety and space to grow in the two vast, Victorian art rooms, where the shackles of school rules couldn’t penetrate. He would set to work at his own furious pace, with an energy and vigour that no one quite understood, including perhaps himself. The results were always incredible.
He gained a BA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art, where, in the words of his friend and contemporary, “he was a great painter … not the style or formal aspects, even though that was all there, but how he used the medium to transport you to intensely rich, fantastical, and sometimes dark imagined spaces. I look back now and realise they always depicted somewhere between the physical and waking world. To be able to produce those types of paintings in the early years of a practice does not come easy. For Greg, it was intuitive”.
It was at university that he attracted a group of friends that were like moths to his brilliant, passionate, magnetic, maddening, hilarious and hazardous flame. He learned to DJ, and like most things he turned his hand to, he excelled at it: catalysing disco and house with a pulsing, urgent techno squelch, hopping genres and unleashing sci-fi samples, ambient soundscapes and ludicrous shout outs engineered from pirate radio stations.
A handsome and beautiful man; Greg’s big brown soulful eyes were protected by gorgeous baby-like eyelashes which seemed to become more visible in his quieter, more reflective moments. He loved to read, sitting for hours with a contented expression, stroking his hair. Indeed, a good book was one of the few things that could slow him down, and he would absorb their contents deeply. No wonder he built up an extraordinary and encyclopaedic knowledge of plants and the natural world.
His adult working life was mostly spent improving the parks and green spaces of South London, the last eight years as head gardener of Burgess Park, in the London Borough of Southwark. He was kind and generous with everyone he met, from corporate volunteers to young learners and regular park users: everyone liked him.
For someone who had always looked to do things at scale, a 140-acre area of London was undoubtedly the ideal canvas. A true environmentalist, he set about rejuvenating the planting throughout the park using the most sustainable and nature-first methods available to him.
He took his work extremely seriously, meticulously documenting what he had done and why in a series of posts which can be read on the Friends of Burgess Park website. He would lead tours of Kew Garden students who would come to pick his brains, and one internationally renowned horticulturist who visited succinctly remarked, “everyone should be a bit more like Greg”.