Portrait of the garden as a place of art and therapy Today, the estate includes a working farm and walled kitchen garden, as well as a wider landscape. It is also home to a popular and successful Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme, where local people join up, volunteer in the five acres of vegetable gardens and have a share in the produce. Area of creativity The garden around Tom's home is clearly inspired by a sense of colour and form. It embodies all that I want to do as an artist. I've painted, I've sculpted, I've drawn for many years and I've taught all those skills, but none of the arts has satisfied me as much as gardening," he says. A long-term volunteer at the school, Tom moved into Russet Cottage about 22 years ago, with his wife, Margrit, and their young family. At that point he was in charge of the walled garden, and the space around his new home was an old orchard. Rife with honey fungus, one by one the apple trees succumbed to the dreaded bootlace fungus, and gradually a new garden evolved. I decided to just experiment with my burgeoning interest in flowers, shrubs, trees and bamboos. Eventually all the apple trees disappeared one by one. This is my own private domain and it's my area of being as creative as possible. But this could only have happened because of the community I live in. I see it as integrated into the wider landscape and the community. All that I've learnt through this, I try to apply to what I do on the bigger estate. Principles of balance The garden has an atmosphere of serenity. This may in part be because underlying aspects of the design satisfy important principles of balance. Pebble sculptures influenced by family trips to Cornwall play a subtle but starring role. Pebbles make visible design principles which I am familiar with from my training as an art therapist. For example, pebbles that express the movement of the concave to the convex are totally satisfying and pleasing. If you've got concavity somewhere you need convexity to be expressed as well," says Tom. Even the sculpted box balls in the knot garden are living expressions of this principle. Tom combines flowers using his knowledge of colour therapy, while the shapes of flower buds, seed heads and clipped shrubs all have a role to play. He combines shapes, colours and tones that many garden designers would shy away from, and uses plants that few would be brave enough to marry together. Soft pink zinnias and vibrant hot, red-orange heleniums vie for attention in the borders with purple perennials such as Agastache 'Blackadder," Verbena 'Homestead Purple" and drifts of Verbena bonariensis. The garden moves through scenes of subtle shades of greens and gold, with sculpted shrubs, stands of bamboos and waving wisps of grasses creating drama. Striking stands of yellow-stemmed Phyllostachys aurea create privacy, and a backdrop for sculpture close to the house. Bamboos I love, partly for the sound and their movement. They make visible air and the movement of air. For a long time, when I was concentrating on colour and flowers, this quality of capturing and embodying the movement of air wasn't strong in my planting. When I became more familiar with grasses and bamboos I realised that this was one of the biggest things missing from my garden. The back of the walled garden provides shelter and warmth. Here, clumps of cannas and melianthus thrive in the protected zone. Rich pink Japanese anemones with their tight ball buds add softness to the borders, while Tom's use of purple with orange stars again and again in surprising places. "It's the redness in both that enhances the colour," he explains. I've discovered in painting, but particularly in planting, that if you use secondary colours together, such as purple and orange or orange and green, or green and purple, they make wonderful combinations. Each of them creates a particular mood: purple and orange have red hidden in them, so there's a great deal of warmth and energy in that. Whereas with orange and green, the hidden underlying quality is yellow, so it has a lighter effect. It's more light-hearted and joyful. If you go to the green and purple, which I also like to work with, there's a hidden element of blue, so you get a somewhat cooler effect. It's the hidden primary colour in the secondary colour combinations which you don't notice straight away but if you are aware of colour theory or colour dynamics you see them. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the cutting border , with flowers propagated on site in the timber-framed greenhouse, where zinnias, tithonia, multicoloured maize, verbena, rudbeckias, heleniums, phlox, Nicandra physalodes 'Violacea," agastache and salvias all jostle for space. Alive with pollinating insects - another of Tom's passions - it's part of the next phase of Tom's garden development: a cutting garden to provide flowers for the house and school and a new income stream for the community. Cool contrast The calm within the storm of colour is provided by the central part of the garden. Originally it was a knot garden that Tom made for Margrit. After a couple of years Margrit just couldn't find the time to do any gardening. Gradually it started to attract me to its sculptural possibilities," Tom explains. I wanted to play with the idea of sculpture, not use too much colour and let the rest of the garden go. The marjorams sowed themselves, the mint took over quite a part of it and the eryngium self-seeded too. I was happy with that, it allowed me to play with the box hedges. When the box started falling apart, I thought I'd make use of the sudden change of direction. It was originally very straight lines and bit by bit I've tried to work with what has arisen. It's restrained colour-wise, but it gives a focus to the rest of the garden. I love standing on the roof of the house and just looking down. In summer, on most evenings I sit on the roof at sunset and look at how the light shifts through the garden. Gardening meets my yearning to be a sculptor, painter and a healer. I trained as an art therapist but I actually find gardening to be the greatest healer of all. The feeling is difficult to quantify. But if you stand in Tom's garden, and take in the balance of colours, textures, light, smells and sounds, you might well agree with him. Open for the first time this year, Tom's garden is listed in the National Gardens Scheme Yellow Book under Thornbury Park Estate, Park Road, Thornbury, Bristol. It opens for the NGS on June 9 and August 25, 11am-4.30pm, entry £4 (ngs.org.uk) The new cut-flower initiative is called Camphill Community Flowers (01454 412194; sheilingschool.org.uk)