Judi Dench has turned her garden into a living roll call of memory, saying in a recent instalment of the Royal Horticultural Society's Roots show on YouTube that she plants a tree for friends as they die.
“Well, as friends die, I plant a tree to them,” Dench said in the conversation, pointing to one tree in her garden for John Stride and another marked with a small rectangular slate for Maggie Smith. She also named other mementoes for Donald Sinden, Bernard Culshaw and John Stride, making the garden itself part memorial and part record of a long career and life among friends.
One tree, she said, was not planted for her late husband, Michael Williams, but he loved it. Williams died in 2001, and Dench said the home and garden brought her comfort after his death because she could still see things he had done around her. That detail gives the garden its weight: it is not only a place she tends, but a place that still carries the work and presence of the man she lost.
The farmhouse home near Outwood, Surrey, where Dench has lived for about 40 years, has its own history. It was reportedly built in 1497 and is believed to include a barn, an additional cottage, workshops and a swimming pool. Dench has spoken before about the strain of keeping it going, saying in 2022 that the mice had moved in since lockdown and that she was battling them, and adding: “My house is falling down a bit here and there.”
That is the friction in the picture she presents now: a grand old home that is still giving her comfort, but also one that leaks, shelters mice and needs constant attention. Even so, Dench's tree for Williams and the names marked in the garden show what matters most to her. She is not preserving the house for nostalgia alone; she is using it to hold on to people who are gone, and that is the story the garden tells most clearly.
