Profile

I’m a landscape designer with over 20 years experience, a broadcaster and journalist.

The gardening skills I learnt as a child, rather grudgingly helping my gardening mum, resurfaced when I moved into my first property - a tiny end-of-terrace house with a postage-stamp garden.  I discovered that actually I really liked gardening, a lot, and so spent all my time perfecting my tiny plot.  

It was when neighbours and friends started asking me to design their gardens I thought I might be able to combine my passion with paying the mortgage.  I completed a landscape design course at Capel Manor and then started working for a large London-based design company where I got hands-on experience designing, drawing, costing and dealing with a large and diverse clientele.  I went solo in 1991, starting my own company - flower design.

My portfolio now covers everything from small domestic gardens to large civil projects and much in between.  I’ve created an effusive country garden for a retired vicar, a restrained contemporary urban garden for a solicitor, a wild and woolly woodland garden for a formula one racing driver, a night time garden for a nocturnal hotelier, a slice of countryside in the city for a homesick MP and a streamlined minimalist roof garden for an eighties pop legend…  

Civil projects include The Piazza as part of Telford town centre’s redevelopment, featuring mosaics, a waterfall and stainless steel benches which the local youth have incorporated into their BMX routines with some enthusiasm - it’s a very inclusive space.

I’ve designed and built public show and trade-fair gardens - planting into the small hours with my patient contractors in our high-vis jackets, scrabbling to be ready for the public opening.  I’ve had great pleasure in turning an area of waste ground, a rubbish dump really, in Carlisle into a community garden and at the other end of the scale working at one of Shropshire’s most beautiful country estates, Peplow Hall, creating large formal Italianate gardens and resurrecting an abandoned walled garden, now producing organic vegetables for the estate.

I work countrywide and live in Bristol with my three children and partner.

Added 23/03/2010