How did you come to fall in love with gardening?
I’ve always loved being outdoors, since as far back as I can remember. My favourite thing to do as an eight-year-old was climb this enormous willow tree at the bottom of the garden, getting as close to the top as possible. It turns out that lots of kids with ADHD love climbing. I loved the feeling of being able to see everything – I could see the garden, and my grandfather working in his vegetable plot. We lived next door to my grandparents, and he was an avid gardener. I would help him collect damsons to make damson gin. We tended to his vegetables and the geraniums in his greenhouse, and we’d go to the secret garden next door, which was out of bounds to me – a vacant Victorian glasshouse, part of a big estate. That was my connection to gardening. My other grandmother lived on a rhododendron nursery, which you had to drive through to get to her house, so that was another so that was another fantastic garden experience growing up.
Sounds idyllic. Where in England did you grow up?
In a place called Munstead in Surrey, where Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll once lived. He was a famous architect, and she’s regarded as the doyen of women in horticulture. They worked closely together – she designed the gardens of his houses. Lutyens even designed her tombstone and surrounding it with begonias, her favourite plants. You can see it today, just as it was, with all these begonias around it. My mother and grandparents are in that same graveyard. There’s quite a synergy. These things have always been in my life, but it wasn’t until I was 28 that I realised how much I needed the outdoors.
How did that realisation hit?
I’d been living in Australia, working for a digital media company. I was made redundant and had the luxury, which isn’t often afforded, of having some time and money on my side, and being able to sit and think about my future. It was like a lightning bolt. Why hadn’t I thought about this before?
How did you turn that idea into a reality?
I signed up for a garden design course in Sydney – I was loving being out there and didn’t want to come back. After getting my diploma, I worked for a few design studios in New South Wales. The best education I had was working for a company called Spirit Level, with this remarkable designer called Hugh Main, who uses the natural materials provided by the land. He was really into resilient planting, using native plants, which was quite forward-thinking in Australia at the beginning of the 2000s, when everyone wanted English gardens.
Has that experience fed into your own approach?
My attitude is always: with the least possible intervention, achieve the best possible results. That means respecting the architecture and not disturbing the land. If I’m landing in a space where there’s a new house with some fencing around it, I’ve got a blank canvas, but if I’m working on a 17th century rectory, I don’t want to get the bulldozers out and start ripping that established environment apart. It’s about respecting the ecology, respecting the history, seeing what I can utilise, editing and transplanting what’s already there. A garden design is not an ego-stamp for me, it’s about working with the client’s brief and responding to the natural surroundings. I’ve never been an award-seeker – making a difference to people’s worlds has been my only ambition. As a result, I’m coming really late to Chelsea, aged 53.
When approaching a garden design, what’s your ultimate aim?
Partly because I’m so sensitive to my environment, I’m always thinking about how I want a space to feel. It’s not just about how it looks, it’s about how it moves, how it smells, how it changes through the year. Ultimately, it’s about how that environment impacts on you as a person. I want people to walk into their garden and feel joy. I want them to come home and look at it and go: “Oh my God, I’m so pleased to be back.” People always remark on my garden. It’s not huge, but what I love about the house, and the reason I wanted to buy it, is that we have space on all four sides. That means I’m not only creating joy for myself, I’m creating joy for my neighbours and the people who walk past.
Are edible plants, like the ones you tended with your grandfather, something you like to incorporate into a garden?
Absolutely. I remember I rented a house once where I didn’t have any vegetable-growing space, so I planted beans and lettuces in the flowerbeds. Nowadays they’re calling those ‘edimentals’, aren’t they? In my own head, I do tend to keep the two quite separate – if you have space to create a kitchen garden, I quite like that space being separated off. However, I do think there’s a lot of room to experiment with edimentals. Whatever you do, I just think you get so much from growing your own food. One of the big questions at the moment is what we’re putting into ourselves and our children, from a food perspective, and it doesn’t get much better than cooking my home grown vegetables on my EGG.
Do you enjoy cooking and eating outdoors?
It’s totally essential. I would like to have the table out there all year around, but my husband ends up putting it away in November, but not our EGG, we cook on that all year round! When you’re in Sydney, the weather’s better, people basically live outdoors, and that attitude is really ingrained in me. I would cook and eat outside off my EGG every day if I could. I’ve got two bifold doors, which basically open up the entire back of my house. Even if it’s not quite the right weather for it, I want to see nature and hear the birds – even that experience changes the mood. Collectively, we’ve been getting further and further away from the experience of interacting with nature, but that interaction is so important.
Tell us about the inspiration behind The ADHD Foundation Garden at Chelsea.
The main idea is to show a parallel between plant diversity and human diversity. The first plant I found was this amazing Carpinus betulus swing tree which has this very curvaceous stem. I just connected with it straight away. On that same day, I also came across a Hydrangea petiolaris, which ordinarily is a climbing hydrangea and needs a wall or support behind it – and there it was, just standing, climbing up nothing. I looked at them both and said: “Aren’t you remarkable plants?” That was around the same time I was getting my diagnosis, and I really identified with those differences. I decided it would be wonderful to create a scheme around plants that don’t do the things we expect them to do. As we understand more and more about neurodiverse conditions, we’re realising that a lot of people take in information in different ways. We need to allow for people thinking differently, in the same way we embrace the different things our plants do.
