About The Designer
I have always had a passion for gardens, art and architecture.
My first experience of gardening was in my grandmother’s cottage in Devonshire at the age of four. When I was nine my mother took me to Sissinghurst where I met Vita Sackville-West. At fifteen I was taken on a tour of Cotswold Gardens where I was entranced by Lawrence Johnstone’s garden at Hidcote Manor, with its stylish French influences.
After two years of art school at 18, I undertook a course in decorative arts at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. I then trained for the stage at the Guildford School of Acting. A couple of years spent understudying and being involved in set dressing and props at the Criterion and other west end theatres, made me realise that gardens could be theatrical too!
Over the past 25 years, my work has taken me from the humblest beginnings in a Fulham back yard to designing gardens in America and Europe. Whilst nearer home: as a consultant at Renishaw Hall, home of the Sitwell family for nearly 400 years.
My style is classical (whether ancient or modern) with a dash of theatre, and a number of commissions have come from the worlds of music, theatre and television.
The smallest outside space is a potential garden to me, be it a window sill, balcony, family garden or ancestral acres. With sensible, practical and artistic planning between client and designer, I believe that any garden can be a Great Little Garden, at home or abroad, and it needn’t take a king’s ransom to achieve!
