Louis Turpin: the fine art of an English garden Nowadays the place is always heaving, but when I first went there was no one around except the two gardeners, Pam and Sibylle (Pamela Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger), who had been there since Vita Sackville-West's day. At that time I was painting people in interiors, using carpets and curtains and other decorative elements to build a sense of structure. When I walked into the Cottage Garden at Sissinghurst, I was knocked out. It had all the elements that interested me about interiors, but it was outdoors. You moved through these different "rooms" with different moods and themes, from the Rose Garden to the Cottage Garden, round the orchard to the White Garden. It changed my view of what I wanted to paint. Ranged around Turpin's studio, a pleasantly tumbledown blue clapboard shed on the edge of an enormous wheat field, is an array of paintings. These testify to his subsequent 30-year journey through Britain's great gardens, from Christoper Lloyd's Arts and Crafts masterpiece at Great Dixter and Piet Oudolf's postmodern walled garden at Scampston in Yorkshire, to the subtropical lushness of Trebah in Cornwall. When I started I didn't realise how special Sissinghurst was. It took some time to find a garden that inspired me as much as that. But when you start looking, you realise there are great things all over Britain, from grand estates to ordinary people's back gardens and even allotments. The characteristic Turpin canvas gives an impression of brimming colour and lushness, as though the artist's eye is right in the flower bed, hemmed in by diverse flora, with distant walls and hedges lending a sense of space and structure. While he claims to be vague on the names and details of particular species, there's an instinctive feel for the different plant forms and the way they've been positioned by the gardeners. Working in oils, he starts with a brightly coloured semi-abstract ground over which he builds the image in patches. This creates a tapestry-like effect, which suits the Victorian-gothic character of many of the gardens he paints, where rather than standing back to view a grand design, the viewer is overwhelmed by a barrage of subtly differentiated colours and textures. And it's clear he sees the gardeners who create them as kindred spirits, who are in effect painting with plants. "Great Dixter, particularly under Fergus Garrett, is constantly changing," he says. Every time I go there it seems to have got fuller, deeper and grander, as though it's bursting out of its edges. At Scampston, Piet Oudolf has large areas of flowing growth, which look fantastic when they've reached their optimum and are just on the turn, with great drifts of windblown seed heads. You've got depth, you've got form, the colours are changing and there's a movement that keeps everything fluid. He contrasts this flamboyant approach with Gertrude Jekyll's garden on Holy Island, where the biting North Sea winds confine growth within Edwin Lutyens's castle walls. You create grand plans as a gardener and nature kicks you up the behind. Some people can't cope when things start to get out of control. But that's the excitement of the process, adapting your ideas to what nature wants to do. And throughout this period of intense observation and speculation on the world of the gardener, he's been writing and singing his blues-based songs, putting out CDs and playing regularly in pubs and at festivals around the South East. A south Londoner, Turpin was born and brought up in Brixton, the son of a film-maker, Digby Turpin, who specialised in animated information films for government agencies. Immersed in art and music from early childhood, Louis became drawn into the early Sixties London blues scene which produced the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Who. At 17 he fell offstage, intoxicated, while supporting the Small Faces at the legendary blues venue, Eel Pie Island. At 19 he was offered a three-year contract by a leading rock manager of the day - he won't say which one - who wanted to turn him into a pop star; an offer he turned down. I'd have had to have given up everything else - the art side. I was always more into jazz and blues than pop, and when I went to see this manager, there was another guy there having a bad acid trip. That left me feeling the whole thing wasn't for me. Instead he went to Falmouth School of Art, where he specialised in first painting, then film. He became a model maker for architects, but finding life in London increasingly stressful, he moved to East Sussex with the idea of growing his own vegetables and keeping chickens. For a city kid to learn how nature works, how some things grow and some don't, was a revelation and very fulfilling. And he began painting again, first in an abstract mode. My studio was beside a hop field. I began using the lines of vertical poles as a starting point for compositions, and gradually the paintings became more figurative. I realised I was happier painting real things and real places. I never looked back from there. Yet the world of rock didn't quite leave him alone. Over the years, he's had the great bluesman Blind Gary Davis jamming in his living room; he's improvised on Jimi Hendrix's Flying-V guitar on a chauffeur-driven car ride with Rolling Stone Mick Taylor; and he's played skiffle with his sometime neighbour Paul McCartney. Has he ever regretted turning down that offer that thousands of aspiring performers would have killed for, and which might have turned him into a household name? I was always more interested in playing jazz like Charlie Mingus than in being a multi-millionaire. The balance I've struck between art and music suits me pretty well. Indeed, it's taken him away from mega-festivals and groupies toward National Trust tea rooms and the people who actually create the gardens he paints - the gardeners. "These days many of them are women," he says, "and they work incredibly hard. They're very organised and they're hugely knowledgable. They're the element that makes the whole thing work. The garden designer puts their mark on it, but the final feeling of the place has a lot to do with the head gardener. What I do is to observe what they've done and translate that into my own expression. And in addition to grand gardens with large teams of workers, Turpin is equally fascinated by those redoubts of the solitary hobbyist, allotments. They're fantastic composites of different people's temperaments and endeavours. Some people are lazy, some just can't help making things grow, others are incredibly neat, others organic. You may get blight running through an allotment, but that's the nature of it. Life isn't all grand plans. Turpin and his wife Davida had an allotment for years. Indeed he's been a keen gardener in his time, but finds he has less and less time for it. There are times when I need to be in the studio, and you can't garden if you resent it. First and foremost I'm a painter. Paintings are just marks on canvas, and what matters to me is creating something that has a sense of rightness and completeness. I don't know so much about the botanical side of gardening, and in a way I prefer not to know. I don't want the paintings to become too literal. I'm more concerned with form and colour and shape. So would he carry on painting gardens if they stopped selling? I'd stop doing them if I didn't have anything new to say or discover. You can't keep doing the same painting. But I think there'll always be a few more gardens out there that I need to paint. 'A Passion for Gardens', an exhibition of the work of Louis Turpin, opens next Saturday until October 12 at the Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon (01491 576228; Bohun Gallery). Gallery: See more of Louis Turpin's garden pictures