Susanna Grant is a garden designer and co-director of Care, Not Capital, with the irrepressible John Little (we wrote about him here). With help from “lots of excellent gardeners and ecologists,” they offer a free program that helps to equip trainees with the skills needed for “modern gardening.” Susanna explains: “The main idea is shifting the emphasis and some of the budget away from hard landscaping and infrastructure towards planting, habitat creation—and gardeners.”
This little yard in North London was transformed by Susanna for like-minded clients, who had already successfully campaigned with their Islington neighbors to get the local authorities to install some planters on a sad stretch of sidewalk, which they described as a “disused piece of pavement.” They asked Susanna to make a wildlife garden there; then asked her to help them with their own disused backyard.
Above: A lot of plants and a consistent palette in the hardscaping make a small space seem bigger. “It was a tough brief as the owner wanted interesting plants: lots of planting plus room. I think it shows what you can fit in a space.” Above: “The back garden is tiny, north-facing and quite boxed in,” says Susanna. “It backs onto flats, and rather than try to pretend they weren’t there, I wanted to ensure the view from the house focused the eye on the planting—not up and beyond.” Above: “The client wanted interesting plants,” continues Susanna. “Although my scheme was predominantly quite woodland because of the aspect, there was an existing banana, nandina domestica and acer palmatum which I needed to work around. I added an Abutilon ‘Canary Bird’ right next to the house as it flowers for most of the year and picks up on the vibe of some of the existing plants.”
When Sarah Pajwani and her family moved into their house near Maidenhead (an hour from London) in 2011, it was surrounded by an “overgrown field.” Having created a design rationale with the help of professional landscapers, Sarah set about filling her garden with plants of her choice, border by border. Despite her best efforts, in winter she would gaze out of the windows and still feel that there was nothing to look at.
Now, every garden-facing room in the house frames a different aspect of the winter scene, and the house has a lot of windows. Dare we suggest that winter is the garden’s best season? We can report that Saint Timothee, as it is called, was the first garden of the year to be open for the National Garden Scheme and Sarah gave us a tour.
Read on for 11 clever design ideas from Sarah to make the garden glow in the winter:
Above: A row of glowing red Cornus sanginea ‘Midwinter Fire’ brings out the best in Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii. Famously vivid in spring, the euphorbia holds on to its structure and excellent leaf color in winter.
Saint Timothee is a picture of 1930s gentility, with an Enid Blyton kind of name. Yet the garden is not in a time warp. Sarah uses colorful stems, scented shrubs (such as Lonicera fragrantissima,Viburnum x bodnantese ‘Dawn’, Sarcococca confusa), sparsely flowering trees (Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’) as well as grasses mixed with evergreens to brighten the winter scene. Several paths and borders lead the eye from one of the inside windows, across the garden.
2. Mixed Grasses
Above: Smoldering dogwood stems draw attention to the drama of super-sized pampas grass, flanking a pond.
Moving perennials or shrubs once they’re in situ can be daunting for a novice gardener. But when you are starting a garden or reinventing one, it’s almost impossible not to make the occasional planting error or realize that you’ve put something in the wrong spot. Yet many plants transplant well—some even require it as part of routine divisions—and the whole process is a lot less scary than you might think.
We asked Edward Flint, who is head gardener at Tidebrook Manor in East Sussex and worked for many years alongside Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter, for his tips on how, when, and why to move plants—and which you should leave well alone.
Here are nine tips to transplant shrubs and perennials:
How to Transplant Shrubs
Moving a shrub is always a risk; some will cope with the stress and trauma better than others but if you need to move it then there are some ground rules.
1. Water before digging. “Water the plant really well the night before and then reduce its canopy,” says Ed. “This will lessen the stress on the plant (balancing the top growth with the roots) but will also make it easier to maneuver the plant.
Above: Bare Root Beech Plants (Fagus sylvatica) make good hedging plants are available in various sizes for prices from £1.29 to £49.99 depending on size from best4hedging.
2. Be gentle with the roots. Try to dig the plant out with as much root ball as possible, cutting into the ground around 12 to 18 inches from the base, says Ed.
3. Plan ahead and root prune before transplanting. If you’re planning to move an established shrub then you can root prune the plant a year before by digging down in a circle around the base, which will lessen the shock when you eventually transplant it. But as a rule, says Ed, shrubby things or woody-based things tend not to move very well.
All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from March.
Anyone who knows British garden designer Jo Thompson’s work will not be surprised by the title of her book, The New Romantic Garden. Over the decades that Thompson has been working as a designer she, has always created atmospheric gardens with a softness and sense of atmosphere and mystery. The 30 gardens that fill the book show how a modern romantic aesthetic can be applied anywhere—from a tiny city garden to the meadows of a country estate. Thompson’s text is delightfully laced with romance, too, with references to fairies, sun goddesses, and Narnia.
Above: Benton irises and roses mingle in this romantic London garden designed by Thompson. Photograph by Jason Ingram.
The “new” in the title reflects the fact that while Thompson’s work may feel nostalgic in some regards (there are many an English rose in this book), it is firmly of-the-moment. A longtime advocate of organic gardening, Thompson designs to support biodiversity and soil health, which are on all gardeners’ minds today. There’s also a looseness and a naturalness that will appeal to fans of the new perennial movement and more naturalistic styles. This book is a fresh perspective on what a “romantic” garden is today.
Photography courtesy of The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson (Rizzoli).
1. Start with the story.
Above: Romantic and natural, this garden has a real sense of place and to whom it belongs (writer Justine Picardie and her husband, Philip Astor). The wildflower meadow of mostly native grasses is peppered with a few nonnatives to extend the season of pollen and visual interest. Photograph by Rachel Warne.
For all of her designs, Thompson develops a story for the garden based on her clients’ desires and the place itself. For Thompson this involves “beating the bounds of the place and really getting to grips with the space,” plus trying to understand its history and what might have been there before. But she says, storytelling can be a delicate dance. “You want to avoid creating a pastiche,” she cautions. “If I’m working with a Tudor cottage near Canterbury, I’m not going to create a little Tudor medicinal garden, but there might be elements, like medicinal plants within the planting.” Likewise, Thompson says she trusts her intuition not to take a garden too far from its roots.
“Everything I do is inspired by Japan, but I’m deliberately not making it all Japanese,” explains Hobson. “There’s no koi pond or red bridges.” Not only does Hobson eschew any decorative Japanese elements, he avoids ornaments altogether. “For me, a Japanese garden is creating a sense of a landscape—an idealized landscape—within the plot. If you bring in ornaments, you ruin the magic of scale. Whereas, if all you’ve got is plants, you can create a sense (if you squint and after a couple of drinks) that maybe you’re looking out into a deep forest.”
Hobson has successfully created this illusion of landscape within his small space. Looking out the windows of the home he shares with his wife, Keiko, and their son, or gazing at photographs of Hobson’s green, layered garden, it’s hard to believe that it’s not much bigger than a tennis court.
When Hobson and his wife bought the house, the backyard had four sheds, a mismatched bunch of overgrown conifers, and a ton of concrete paths. They ripped it all out, leaving just the evergreen hedge that blocks the view from a neighboring building. Hobson commissioned a local carpenter to build a single new shed inspired by a Japanese “summer house” at the back of the plot. Then he planted dozens of evergreen and coniferous shrubs and trees that he has been training and pruning for the last fourteen years. The result is a garden that feels like its own miniature world, full of living sculptures.
Let’s take a tour of Hobson’s garden, which he photographed himself. (You can follow him on Instagram @niwakijake.)
Above: Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)
Let us count the many reasons we love Butter Wakefield, the Maryland-born, London-based garden designer who has won numerous prestigious awards for her exuberant projects (twice at the Chelsea Flower Show!). 1) She has no fear of color (her home is as bright and joyful as her gardens). 2) No outdoor space is too tiny for her—in fact, small city backyards are her forte. 3) She designs gardens as one would design interiors, that is, with attention to texture, palette, balance, and comfort. 4) Then, of course, there’s that ridiculously charming name (a childhood moniker that has blessedly stuck). Is there any question we’d be fans?
Read on to learn the pros who inspire her (it’s a who’s who of British designers), the dreamy garden object on her wish list, and best of all, images of her own compact West London backyard. And if you find yourself wanting still more Butter in your life, be sure to sign up for her just-launched online course on “Small Garden Design” with the Create Academy.
My maternal grandfather had the most spectacular gardens in the gorgeous countryside outside of Philadelphia. They were gloriously flower-filled and curiously very English in style and design. I loved wandering around and through them as a girl, and loved the colour-rich tapestry he created.
Above: Don’t have space to plant a tree? Consider a potted tree.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Working for friends is often so much more difficult than one ever imagines.
Favorite gardening hack:
Plunging small pots in large buckets of water through out the summer, it’s the quickest best way to water them.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: Potted roses.
Growing a range of reliable cut flowers in pots is something I always try to include in every scheme. It’s a hugely joyful undertaking to step outside, cut flowers and bring fresh blooms indoors. It is certianly my favourite way to start the weekend.
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista founder Michelle Slatalla is from 2017.
Whether it’s a new patio or a complete garden overhaul, any landscaping project can quickly outgrow its budget unless you plan ahead. I speak from experience.
In the six years since I moved into my house on a small lot (0.15 acres in downtown Mill Valley, California), I’ve changed nearly every aspect of the outdoor space, from the backyard to the front garden. The upgrades included a new patio, garden beds, paths, a gate, and a privacy hedge. Every step of the way, there were decisions to make on where to splurge and where to save.
As with most budgets, mine required more saving than splurging. Here are the top 10 ways I saved money on landscape design without cutting corners.
Photography by Matthew Williams for Gardenista.
1. Don’t toss; transform.
Above: My backyard gate is a repurposed vintage iron trellis, which we discovered leaning against the facade soon after we moved to the house and began to liberate the garden from years of overgrowth.
“Don’t toss; transform” is a lesson I learned from my friend Jean Victor, who wrote the chapter on Expert Advice: Garden Design in our Gardenista book: “Avoid the temptation to rip out and discard everything in your existing landscape,” Jean recommends. “Repurpose bricks from a planter for a new pathway; use old fence pickets to make a gate; dig up hardy perennials and move them to a new bed.”
2. Embrace the slippery slope.
Above: Rather than trying to change the grade of my sloping front garden, I planted perennials and grasses that would accentuate the lay of the land.
“It is lucky perhaps that Bloomsbury has a pleasant reverberating sound, suggesting old-fashioned gardens and out-of-the-way walks and squares; otherwise how could one bear it?” It is apparent throughout the rest of this reminiscence by British artist Vanessa Bell that the fertile post-Victorian cultural movement known as Bloomsbury, based on the London neighborhood that was the intellectual hub of the era, drew unsolicited attention from its earliest days. When the First World War broke out, gossipmongers became even more fixated with the young iconoclasts when they declared themselves to be conscientious objectors. Leaving behind the gardens, walks, and drawing rooms of this low-key part of central London, the Bloomsbury Group relocated to the country, helping the war effort by working on farms. This period is the focus of the Garden Museum’s small and remarkably well-packaged showGardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors (until September 29).
Paintings, photographs, and letters relating to the gardens of three Bloomsbury women, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell—as well as Vita Sackville-West, who was part of Bloomsbury’s constellation—show us that regarding this much-discussed group, there is always something left to say.
The bohemian atmosphere of Charleston, when occupied by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant—and a variety of intellectuals who did a lot of room swapping —has been well documented. The house was and is very much connected with a farm, located at the end of a bumpy track. The garden was a form of self-expression, just like the house, and plants that were grown for color and shape made their way into some of the paintings that are gathered in this show (and are mainly missing from Charleston Farmhouse). The garden was designed by artist and critic Roger Fry, whose garden portraits of Vanessa, for whom he had a briefly reciprocated passion, are included here.
Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House
Above: “The point of it is the garden,” wrote Virginia Woolf about Monk’s House, the house she shared with her husband Leonard Woolf, a few miles from Charleston. Photograph by Caroline Arber, from Required Reading: Virginia Woolf’s Garden.
“She often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” The quote on the endpapers at the back of the well-illustrated catalog has a particular resonance with ideas around mental health and gardening today. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it is revealing of Woolf’s own relationship with gardens: she left the hard graft to Leonard but her diaries reveal that she enjoyed getting her hands into the soil. Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, and Between the Acts (unfinished at time of death) were written in a “lodge” by the orchard.
The Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, had a thing about red hot pokers. Making an appearance in To the Lighthouse, they frame Mr and Mrs Ramsay as they walk in their summer garden, and the show has an endearing photograph of Woolf standing between some of these South African giants. It is very possible that Vita Sackville West included them in her cottage garden of sunset colors at Sissinghurst as a homage to Woolf. Red hot pokers were more suburban than bohemian at mid-century, and Vita’s husband Sir Harold Nicolson couldn’t abide them.
Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst
Above: “I visualize the white trumpets of dozens of Regale lilies,” wrote Vita Sackville-West when dreaming up the White Garden at Sissinghurst. Photograph by Kendra Wilson, from The English Gardener: His and Hers, Harold and Vita.
A career in art direction is a useful grounding for anybody wishing to go into garden design. Sheila Jack’s career shift was not so much a break as a continuum—of research, editing, and presentation. Before designing the pages of Vogue magazine, her first job was for the architect Norman Foster, and these visual strands from the past feed into her present-day career as a landscape designer.
We visit the project which turned Sheila’s design ideas into something more three-dimensional: her own urban garden.
Above: A work studio faces the house in Sheila Jack’s garden in Hammersmith, London.
“When we installed my husband’s garden studio, we needed to create a pathway to it,” explains Sheila of the garden’s layout. “Our children were beyond the need for lawn, so there was scope to include more planting.”
Above: Photograph by Sheila Jack.
I first met Sheila by the photocopying machine at Tatler magazine, several decades ago. Amid the madness, Sheila stood out as a beacon of clarity, in a crisp white shirt. A few years later I spotted Sheila, ever crisp, at 444 Madison Avenue, a recent arrival at Condé Nast in New York. While I failed to take my job on the 17th floor seriously, Sheila worked hard downstairs, in the scary offices of Vogue. Fast-forwarding a few years, she suddenly appeared on Instagram, with beautifully composed pictures of gardens, in focus. How had she got from there to here?
Above: Sheila’s London garden of mainly green and white.
It is the straight species, though, that hold the most promise. “In my opinion, species tulips are the future, and an exciting one,” says Polly. They can be naturalized in grass or gravel, taken indoors in small pots, or placed in a tulipière (this one above is made by Katrin Moye). Species tulips are the past as well: “also known as wild or botanical tulips [they] are the forerunners of all tulips grown in gardens today.”
The tulips that we mainly think of as classic are a bit like standard King Alfred daffodils or Pink Lady apples; the mainstream selection is narrow in comparison to the huge variety of species and historic cultivars. This book will persuade you that these are worth seeking out, and there is not much detective work to be done, if you consult Polly’s lists toward the back.
Above: Naturalized under globe-pruned pear trees, Tulipa clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’, is offered widely and easy to grow.
Successful, multiplying colonies of species tulips in a garden are the result of trial and error, while attempting to replicate their original conditions. Sometimes they need to be moved around before they find the right home. Tulipa clusiana is recommended for beginners. T. clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’ grows at the front of a border in Polly’s walled garden; its looks are a mix of diffidence and artifice that annual tulips cannot match. “It has obviously been introduced, but it looks completely natural and at home.”
Above: Naturally spreading, yellow Tulipa sylvestris is one of the original, un-hybridized wild tulips.
In gardens, Tulipa sylvestris is best placed among spring herbage and flowers that are not also bright yellow, so that its shape and subtle coloring, with brown-green stems and sepals, can be seen at their best. It’s shown here with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ and dark hellebores in woodland beds. Rough ground is more accommodating than a flower bed, though, as they spread through underground stolons. With a similar profile and intensity of color, Tulipa sprengeri is a throbbing, warm red species flower that may find itself radiating alone, or mainly against green. Polly grows them with irises.
In the first column of my series on creating a garden from scratch, I posed some starting points to think about before you make any radical changes to your space. In this second installment, I’m diving deeper and covering the key design decisions you need to consider for a strong foundation—both literal and metaphorical.
Here are the six elements that go into a beautiful foundation for your garden.
Above: My English garden in midsummer. When I arrived this area was a lavender walk with some climbing roses. The lavenders were tired and needed replacing so I decided to remove the whole border and start again, keeping only the climbing rose at the far end of the border. We widened the border to create depth and I planted two long copper beech hedges at the back of the border (buying very young bareroot plants to keep costs down. I then planted ornamental pear trees every two metres which introduces spring blossom and valuable upright structure and presence. Underneath is a succession of perennials and bulbs, mostly in blue and apricot; tulips and alliums are followed by hardy geraniums, nepeta, foxgloves, baptisa, penstemons, ornamental grasses, hydrangeas and salvias. Self-seeders are enthusiastically encouraged.
1. A Limited Materials Palette
Above: Putting in the hardscaping is the first job in most gardens. As it’s permanent, it’s also the most important to get right. I’ve used self-binding gravel for almost all the paths and terraces in my garden; it’s very easy to lay, essentially just spreading it out over a stable sub-base and then compressing it down. But the soft golden colour also blends beautifully into the garden so that it almost disappears. My one regret is having it close to buildings because tiny pieces of the gravel always migrate indoors.
One of the biggest investments of time and money in a new garden is the hardscaping, so it pays to take the time to ensure that any paths, terraces, steps, and other paved or graveled areas are exactly where you want them, feel appropriate to your home and garden style, and will stand the test of time. When planning these areas, be generous, because over time plants will normally encroach into hardscaped areas and soften the edges.
Hardscaping needs to feel in proportion to the house and garden—and look visually appropriate (e.g., a traditional brick path will always look right next to a period building with similar brickwork). To keep these spaces cohesive and harmonious, restrict your materials palette; using a wide variety of finishes can be jarring to the eye. Some materials, including gravel or self-binding gravels, can work with almost any style of architecture.
Just as you would with paints for the interior of your home, get samples of the hardscaping materials you’re considering and live with them for a while. Or plan a field trip or two to see similar materials in a real garden setting. If you’re starting with a true blank canvas, you can mark out areas with a line marker (use hosepipe to create sinuous curved lines) so that you can walk through areas and make sure they feel right.
Whichever surface material you choose, a solid, stable base—usually compressed crushed materials and sand—is key to ensure that the surface can cope with daily wear and weather. It’s possible to do most landscaping projects with basic DIY skills, but just like home projects a perfect finish by a professional is often hard to replicate.
2. Good ‘Bones’
Above: A clipped hedge, shaped shrubs, topiary and a specimen tree can all help to create the bones of a garden that have a permanent, year-round presence. When I bought my house, I had very little gardening experience but I knew that any green structure was potentially useful so I nurtured the hedges, many of which had been eaten down to stubs by horses. We allowed them to recover and grow before clipping many of them into cloud-pruned shapes. I added a few specimen trees including a multi-stem jacquemontii birch tree, pictured here. On the right hand side of this picture a self-seeded hawthorn was left to grow, providing a froth of white blossom in spring.
The phrase “English garden” may conjure a particular image in your mind: perhaps the neatly clipped hedges and expansive lawns of a country estate or maybe an informal tumble of blossoms spilling over a path in a cottage garden. The recently-published book The English Gardener’s Garden proves, in 2023, there are a myriad of definitions of what an English garden is.
When Phaidon published The Gardener’s Garden in 2014, the globe-spanning, 500-page book was an instant success. Nearly ten years later, the publisher has narrowed their geographic scope to the English isles. The English Gardener’s Garden extracts the British gardens from the earlier book and offers updated photography and additional gardens for a total of more than 60 English gardens and 300 photographs.
Above: The gardens at Great Dixter in East Sussex have passed through many hands. Once the family home of Christopher Lloyd, they are now under the stewardship of Fergus Garrett. Photograph by Andrew Montgomery, from The English Gardener’s Garden.
With a foreword by garden writer and designer Tania Compton and a brief history of English gardening by Dr. Toby Musgrave, The English Gardener’s Garden is a welcome addition to any Anglophile gardener’s library. It is part inspirational tome and part armchair travel experience with gorgeous photography to linger over.
Above: Dan Pearson was tasked with creating a garden amongst the ruins of Lowther Castle, which are part of a 130 acre estate in Penrith, Cumbria. Photograph by Claire Takacs, from The English Gardener’s Garden.
The book can also be used as a practical guide for planning your next trip to visit English gardens: There’s even a directory of the gardens that are open to the public (we hear many of the private ones are often open as well through the National Garden Scheme’s visiting days).
Above: Levens Hall’s topiaries are some of the oldest in the world. The 10-acre garden located in Kendal, Cumbria was designed by Guillaume Beaumont in the 16th century. Photograph by Richard Bloom, from The English Gardener’s Garden.
The gardens in the book have roots going back 500 years and include designs by legends like Capability Brown and Gertrude Jekyll. These gardens “are not just a dialogue between art and nature but an entire conversation between the spirits of the creators past and present,” writes Compton in her foreword. Indeed, it is the tension between past and present and seeing ancient estates alongside contemporary designs that makes this book so interesting.
Above: Sarah Price’s Maggie’s Centre Garden is located at a cancer center in Southampton, Hampshire. Photograph courtesy by Hufton+Crow, courtesy of Maggie’s Centre, from The English Gardener’s Garden.
Inside you’ll find what Compton describes as “gardens that have risen from the ashes of a neglected past to stride with the times,” such as Dan Pearson’s garden planted amongst the ruins of Lowther Castle, and of-the-moment designs like the Maggie’s Centre Garden located at a cancer center in Southampton, Hampshire, that opened in 2021. The book also wanders into lesser known public and private gardens. I’ve bookmarked Rousham as a must visit for a future date after flipping through the book.
Above: Its gorgeous botanical cover is based on a 1901 print from the Morris & Co. archives; The English Gardener’s Garden is $46.45 on Bookshop.org.
