We Asked Landscape Architects For Their Garden Design Secrets

How do famous gardeners (and not-so-famous ones) create their own private bucolic idyll at home? Clare Coulson went on a horticultural odyssey to find out– and discover their very best garden design ideas.

Garden Design Ideas From Leading Landscape Architects

Butter Wakefield © Éva Németh, from Wonderlands by Clare Coulson

The ripples of influence from the world’s leading landscape architects and garden designers stretch out exponentially, influencing what we plant and how, shaping our approach to horticulture, biodiversity and sustainability; a stand-out show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show can dictate planting palettes, design details or choice cultivars for years to come.

But what happens in a garden designer’s own space at home, and how do these gardens feed into their process? In Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home those private spaces are revealed, as 18 leading landscape architects open up their garden gate for me and photographer Éva Németh, with sumptuous, inspiring and often surprising results. Some of the gardens are lifelong projects – Arabella Lennox-Boyd has crafted her extraordinary garden at Gresgarth Hall in Lancashire for 45 years, a lifetime of collecting trees and shrubs, sculpting the landscape and creating lavish borders. Arne Maynard has spent two decades nurturing his jewel-box of a garden at Allt-y-bela, his home in the bucolic hills of Monmouthshire – a garden studded with immaculate topiary and delicious planting.

Tom Stuart Smith © Éva Németh, from Wonderlands by Clare Coulson

Many of the gardens in the book were started – as with so many projects across the nation – in the spring of 2020. Brothers Harry and David Rich began work on their mesmerising garden of billowing plants around a fairytale cottage hidden deep in the Brecon Beacons; Miranda Brooks worked on an awe-inspiring landscape from pasture using stunning topiary to bring a sense of instant maturity. And Sheila Jack – a former magazine art director-turned-landscape architect – transformed the most unprepossessing concrete farmyard into a contemporary garden of perennials and grasses that sits gently in its surrounding meadows.

As well as being rich with ideas and clever design solutions, the gardens all illustrate the resourcefulness and ingenuity of designers to sculpt a patch of land into a transporting garden. In Wiltshire, Catherine FitzGerald conjures a similar magic, immersing her characterful former brewery into a froth of romantic and statuesque planting while her husband, the actor Dominic West, carved out the most exquisite natural swimming pond where bird and insects swoop down in the early evening, adding to the dream-like scene.

Catherine Fitzgerald © Éva Németh, from Wonderlands by Clare Coulson

These are hands-on projects – they may feel out of reach but they are attainable too. With his heavenly cottage garden in west Sussex, Chris Moss illustrates how he has made a garden in a rented home, mindful of what he might take if ever he moves on, but also of what would stay for any future owners. And that perhaps is the beauty of these wonderlands – they evolve in myriad ways, and inspire us to plant our own garden of dreams.

Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Homeby Clare Coulson is out now. waterstones.com