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Tree buying at fabulous trade nurseries

Buying mature trees & topiary for clients is a real perk of my job. I get to go to wonderful places & buy fantastic specimen trees – some so enormous we have to plant them with the aid of a crane. Last week I went with Tom to find trees & topiary for my Bath project currently being built by his team. This is one of my drawings of my design. It is a courtyard garden behind one of the fabulous classical Georgian facades at this elegant townhouse just near the Royal Crescent. My aim is for the garden to …

Designing my own gardens

I do love a project! We have moved house several times over the years where we have gutted & redesigned the house & the garden too. It’s fun to design it all but I also really like to put my stamp on a place. Everyone has their own distinctive taste & style & I’m no exception. I thought I’d show you a few of my own gardens I’ve designed & built over the years… Henley on Thames We bought a townhouse right in the centre of Henley as we wanted to be able to walk everywhere & enjoy all that …

A Cotswold garden site visit today

It’s a lovely life being a garden designer & today was no exception. I visited a large Cotswold garden & despite being blasted by freezing cold wind & a threatening grey sky I was delighted with what I saw. Last time I was there there was a great deal of brown as it had all been seeded. Being forty acres that’s a lot of brown! It’s still really early spring but you can see it all coming to life & the structure is as I had hoped. Below I have planted Prunus Serrula trees through gravel for structural interest whilst …

A day in Antwerp buying trees last week

There is the most fantastic nursery in Antwerp in Belgium where we occasionally take clients to buy really special mature trees & topiary. This week was one of those lucky weeks where we flew out for the day to see what we could find. I went with Tom Seward of TS Landscapes who build many of my gardens & collected him at 4am to travel to Heathrow. We met our clients there & the nursery collected us at the other end in Belgium. We chatted all the way & as always we were blown away by everything we saw on …

Garden open to the public

One of my gardens was opened to the public last week under the open gardens scheme & it was a great success. The sun shone, people arrived in droves, much tea & cake was consumed all was well in my world! Jane & Doug who own the garden had it looking pretty pristine – all of us involved with this lovely project were very proud. Over £1400 was raised for the charity & numbers neared 300 visitors. Here are some pics I took on the day