The fashion designer’s garden
Molly Goddard is best known for her tulle dresses — clouds of pink and red and lemon that have become a uniform for a certain kind of woman who wants to look like she is attending a party even when she is buying milk. What fewer people know is that Goddard is an obsessive gardener, and that the garden of her East London house has become as much a part of her creative practice as her sketchbook.
‘I started gardening during lockdown, like everyone else,’ she says, standing in her greenhouse in paint-splattered overalls, a mug of tea in one hand and a trowel in the other. ‘But unlike everyone else, I did not stop. It turned out to be the missing part of my design process. Fashion is about control — every seam, every stitch. Gardening is the opposite. You cannot control a plant. You can only give it the conditions and then watch what it does.’
What she grows
Goddard’s garden is not tidy. Sweet peas scramble over rusted iron arches. Dahlias in shades of burgundy and apricot crowd a bed that was supposed to hold vegetables. A single rampant climbing rose — ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’, planted three years ago — has colonised an entire wall. ‘I like things that look like they are winning,’ she says. ‘A garden should feel slightly out of control. That is where the beauty is.’
She cuts flowers for the house every morning — a ritual she describes as ‘more important than coffee.’ The arrangements go into whatever vessel is closest: jam jars, paint pots, a vintage crystal decanter she found at a car boot sale. ‘I do not arrange them. I just put them in water. They arrange themselves.’
The connection to fashion
Goddard sees a direct line between the garden and the runway. ‘My last collection started with the colour of a dahlia I grew — this incredible burnt orange that I could not get out of my head. I took a petal to my fabric supplier and said, match this. They thought I was mad.’ The resulting dresses, in silk tulle and crisp cotton, were the most personal work she has ever shown. ‘That dahlia changed everything. A flower, growing in a pot in Hackney, made its way onto a runway in Paris. That is the kind of chain reaction that gardening makes possible.’
