Gardens Illustrated’s top 20 horticultural heroes 2024 is our list of extraordinary garden champions who are having an impact on places, people, plants and the planet. From climate crusaders to passionate plantspeople and exciting educators to those who go the extra mile to make a difference, we have scoured the gardening world to identify fantastic initiatives, ideas and stories to feel hopeful about.
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Gardens Illustrated's 20 Horti Heroes for 2024
Sarah Wilson, Veteran's Growth
Best known as the creator and host of the Roots and All gardening podcast, Sarah Wilson is also CEO of Veterans’ Growth. The charity works with military veterans who are suffering with mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, aiming to reduce anxiety, depression and isolation by creating long-term social relationships and introducing people to new skills via horticulture.
It was established in 2019 by Sarah’s partner at the time, Jason Stevens – an army veteran who, after experiencing a stroke at the age of 35, found no support available. He realised gardening was the only thing that had any positive impact on his mental wellbeing, and founded the charity. It now operates with a team of seven and up to 15 volunteers, at an eight-acre site near Hastings in East Sussex, for which they pay peppercorn rent thanks to a kindly benefactor.
The team has created ornamental and veg-growing areas, as well as fruit cages, meadows, a pond, orchard and mixed woodland. “We try to incorporate a bit of everything, so that people get a taste of different sorts of gardening,” says Sarah. They run horticultural therapy sessions, predominantly with military veterans but also members of the general public who are dealing with mental health challenges, tailoring the programme of work to each individual. This relaxed approach also extends to how people find their way to the charity – some through official referrals, and others through self-referring. “We’ve got very low barriers to entry,” explains Sarah, “as we want to make it really easy for people to come along.”
People looking to help can contribute via Just Giving, donate their time or equipment that they don’t use anymore, or even get in touch to talk about giving clients further employment.
Henry Agg
Henry will be a new face to many in horticulture, but not to his hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. He built his profile with posts and reels on gardens and health, especially mental health. Recently, Henry did a sponsored 24-hour gardening marathon in aid of the charity Mind, live-streaming much of it from his own garden, as a way to raise funds but also to promote awareness about mental health challenges.
The motivation stemmed from his own experience. Henry works in high-level executive recruitment, but developed an interest in gardens and taught himself landscaping skills from books and YouTube. He studied for his RHS Level 2 and 3 qualifications in horticulture at night before studying garden design at The English Gardening School, and setting up his own design company last year.
Friends were amazed at how he managed to juggle his responsibilities as a father of three kids, working full-time, studying, and growing his business and social media presence on the side. “I just put it down to being good at spinning plates,” he says. “But then those plates came crashing down.”
He suffered bouts of depression, anxiety and panic attacks. “I was in a terrible spot, and it was a real struggle for my family. That’s when I started to speak with my GP and talk about it on Instagram. I got people reaching out to me saying, ‘I’ve got depression too’, or ‘I feel suicidal’. I’d opened the door to all these people, and I’m not the most qualified to give mental health advice, but I can direct them to a charity such as Mind.”
Henry knew the power of green therapies and that gardening can help lessen anxiety, and decided to give himself a goal or project to focus on – the marathon gardening challenge, which took place in August. “It was more of an endurance test than I thought,” he admits. “I was extremely tired – I haven’t done an all-nighter since I was a teenager.” In the end, Henry single-handedly raised almost £11,700 in
24 hours. “It was a feel-good event,” he says, “but I slept for about 20 hours afterwards.”
Instagram @henryagg
You can support Henry’s Mind fundraiser here
Maggie Haynes, Tuppenny Barn
In 2005, after a career in the military, and despite having never grown anything in her life, Maggie decided to set up a community food-growing project near Emsworth in Hampshire. As a concerned mother of two young children, she wanted to introduce families to organic, homegrown produce and teach kids about the environment. She bought the land with a mortgage and set up a two-acre smallholding, but two years in, she realised that “you don’t get much profit from lettuces or cucumbers”.
Maggie pivoted to planning the building of a sustainable education centre that could host people in a weatherproof setting all year, and the project has grown and grown. Almost 20 years on, Tuppenny Barn is a registered charity providing services including educational visits for up to 2,000 children a year, who come to learn about where food comes from, and healthy eating. There are orchards with bee hives, soft-fruit cages, vegetable beds, cut-flower beds, polytunnels and a pond with boardwalk.
Almost 20 years on, Tuppenny Barn is a registered charity providing an array of services, including educational visits for up to 2,000 children each year, where they learn about where food comes from, eating healthy and cooking. Maggie also runs a young carers project with emotional wellbeing sessions every fortnight for children between 11 and 13 who look after a family member.
There are several social and therapeutic horticulture group sessions in the garden each week for adults, and the team of 15 plus 18 volunteers also facilitate City & Guilds training, courses in veg growing and a female veterans’ group. Locals are welcome to drop in to buy plants, produce and homemade fare such as jams, to order a veg bag or come to the regular pub quizzes and Christmas market.
Maggie is now focused on raising funds to create a permanent shop, community café and outdoor classroom. “We’re looking forward to an exciting future,” she says.
Kate Bradbury
Kate is a garden writer and author specialising in wildlife gardening, whose journey began when she fell in love with a nest of bumblebees living in an old duvet outside. “Bumblebee Conservation Trust told me how to move the nest, at night, to my first allotment. We dressed up in net curtains so we wouldn’t get stung,” she says. “I still got stung.”
Working first on Grow Your Own, then BBC Gardeners’ World magazines, Kate always added bits about bumblebees into everything she wrote. “I wouldn’t stop going on about bees. I think I wore them down. They made me wildlife editor.”
Since then she has gone freelance and written practical books including The Wildlife Gardener, but also the memoirs The Bumblebee Flies Anyway and One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate, which came out this summer. Where other writers look at the broad strokes of these issues, Kate’s focus is on her and our back gardens and the difference they can make. She recently fostered three orphaned baby seagulls, and runs a local hedgehog group.
She is patron of Froglife and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and an RHS and Butterfly Conservation ambassador. Kate is also an active thorn in the side of her local council, Brighton and Hove, campaigning about the importance of street weeds to wildlife, such as rare moths and goldfinches, and advocating for an end to pesticide use.
Kate’s drive to make people understand the scale and impact of biodiversity loss has only become more urgent. “I’ve been banging on about bees since 2006 and I feel like I haven’t done enough, because this year has just been the worst year ever for bees and butterflies. We need to give more lifelines to species,” she says. “Otherwise we’re going to lose everything.”
Instagram @kategbradbury
Mo Kebbay, RHS
Mo is head of diversity, inclusion and wellbeing at the Royal Horticultural Society, a role he took up in June 2022 after working in the same field in the banking, real estate and design sectors. He was aware of, and attracted to, the organisation’s community outreach programmes, and believed he could add value.
He started out with a period of discovery, talking and consulting with people from all arms of the charity. “It takes some time to understand the diverse functions of the RHS and I needed to learn about these different parts of the organisation,” he says. “I discovered that the RHS is truly amazing, mammoth and complex, with many moving parts.”
To get a sense of the representation of different groups, Mo ran a campaign to encourage employees to update and share their diversity information. Since he started, he has also introduced a financial wellbeing hub to support employees facing challenges with the cost-of-living crisis; launched a diversity, inclusion and wellbeing steering group; developed networks for LGBT+, menopausal and neurodivergent employees; and signed an industry charter to commit to opening up horticulture to under-represented groups.
Mo has now created a diversity, inclusion and wellbeing plan called Becoming Inclusive by Instinct, focused on making the RHS a more inclusive organisation that fosters a culture of belonging, and cultural and social equity. It includes the aim to increase the percentages of employees from ethnic minorities, with disabilities and who are LGBT+ by 2030.
Liz Nicholson
Liz is managing director of landscape design and construction company Nicholsons. Concerned about the environmental impact of the spaces she was creating, she took time during the Covid-19 lockdown to become a chartered environmentalist, which set her on the path to developing the Green Design Audit.
It’s tricky to accurately measure the carbon emissions and other impacts of a garden design, meaning the sector is quite a way behind other industries.
When the RHS first began developing its sustainability goals and asked show garden designers at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show to quantify these sorts of things, no one was sure where to start or what tools to use – a situation that Liz, as a senior show garden judge, was aware of and increasingly uncomfortable with.
She began thinking about the parameters for a tool that could do this, in line with natural capital accounting. She considered carbon emissions and material usage (focusing on reducing waste), the extent to which a design enhanced biodiversity and ecologies, and reduced impacts on water and air pollution, as well as the impacts on societies and communities. “There are around 100 questions that tackle this broad subject area,” explains Liz, “giving somewhat arbitrary scores to guide every designer.
It isn’t a question of passing or failing, but more an educational tool and an aspiration to improve.”
This year, the audit was adopted by the RHS for all Chelsea show gardens, and it reduced emissions by around 25 per cent. Liz is now working with the technical advisory groups of other industry bodies, such as the Society of Garden Designers, the Landscape Institute and the British Association of Landscape Industries, to develop the tool further and build it into a web-based platform.
John Little, Care not Capital
John Little’s LinkedIn profile says he is a ‘hole digger’ – a typically humorous understatement from this former shoe salesman turned wildlife-garden guru. Owner of the Grass Roof Company and the brownfield-inspired Hilldrop garden in Essex, he’s an avid experimentalist, growing in waste substrates to create low-input, biodiversity-boosting planting.
He is also the founder of a new community interest company, Care not Capital, which wants to matchmake skilled gardeners with organisations such as housing associations, hospitals and community gardens, and support them to work together in improving the provision of public green space. John spent many years managing the grounds of Clapton Park housing estate in Hackney, London, working with the residents to develop and maintain it in imaginative ways. By listening to what they wanted and delivering it, he ensured people valued their surroundings and felt ownership of it – quite different from the usual grounds-maintenance team approach.
John wants other places to benefit from this ethos and believes in investing more in gardeners to look after existing spaces, as opposed to always putting money into new infrastructure and projects. He is developing a Gardeners’ Charter looking at all the important aspects of a gardener’s work, and plans to hold training at Hilldrop for working gardeners to help them upskill in everything their job requires outside of horticulture. “We want to redefine what the modern gardener should be,” he says. There are also plans to fund gardeners to support community groups, paying them properly to consult, advise and guide volunteers and organisers on how to succeed and thrive.
Instagram @grassroofco
JC Niala
JC Niala wears many hats – writer, historian, anthropologist, poet and artist are some of them – but has recently become known for campaigns around access to allotments. She has an anthropology DPhil in urban gardening from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and has written several papers on the subject. She also writes about allotments and contributed to the book This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing, edited by Sarah Rigby and published earlier this year.
During her doctorate, she embarked on a project to recreate a 1918 allotment on Elder Stubbs Allotments in Oxford. Drawing parallels between the 1918 Spanish flu and Covid-19, the project explored the role of outdoor spaces in times of crisis, particularly pandemics.
Through growing heritage varieties of vegetable, the plot offered a direct connection to those who tended the same land over 100 years earlier, becoming a space of living history. It also inspired individuals to share wartime allotment stories from their families and talk about those lost during Covid – highlighting the power of allotments as spaces of connection.
In 2023, JC was the lead artist on a project with Greenpeace that led to allotments making headlines across the UK after finding that 174,183 people were on a waiting list for a plot.
“Access to growing spaces is not just about food; it’s about reconnecting with the basics that sustain us,” she says. “In urban settings, where life can be overwhelming, the act of gardening brings us back to simple, essential rhythms. It’s a way to improve our mental and physical wellbeing, a reminder that in nurturing the earth, we nurture ourselves.”
Through her research and projects, JC highlights untold gardening stories, opens up conversations around access to growing space, and ultimately helps people to connect with each another and the earth.
Instagram @jcniala
Sarah Cook and Jim Marshall
When we sent out feelers to ask who we should include in our Horti Heroes list, Jim Marshall’s name came up again and again. Jim has gardened and been part of the industry all his life, spending 25 years at the National Trust as gardens adviser. He also worked closely with the national training organisation Lantra, encouraging young people and those seeking a career change to consider land-based jobs – a cause, like that of horticulture in schools, about which he is passionate.
Jim was awarded the prestigious Victoria Medal of Honour in 2023, is vice chair of the RHS Herbaceous Plant Committee and has been part of the conservation charity Plant Heritage since it began in 1978. He holds two National Collections of Dianthus – including the much-diminished and tricky-to-grow Malmaison cultivars, which he is determined to retain in cultivation.
He shares this conservation drive with his wife Sarah Cook, who was head gardener at Sissinghurst for 14 years, but is best known now for researching, tirelessly hunting down and rescuing from obscurity the Benton irises from disparate corners of the UK and the world.
She holds the National Collection of Sir Cedric Morris iris introductions, which she showed at RHS Chelsea in 2015, winning a Gold medal for her impactful exhibit. This spawned a new demand for these unusual blooms in painterly tones of creamed-coffee, purple and burgundy – now back in fashion and most memorably used by Sarah Price in her 2023 Chelsea show garden.
This impressive couple are active in their home county of Suffolk, regularly holding open garden days, and despite being in the sector for decades, are always up for embracing and promoting new developments and change, such as going peat-free.
Thomas Kendall, Wayward
Even if you haven’t heard of Wayward, you might have already experienced its work. The award-winning collective of designers, artists and urban growers was formed in 2006, and has since pioneered the ambitious and large-scale temporary greening of derelict sites and ‘meanwhile’ spaces. Associate director Thomas has been running Wayward alongside founder Heather Ring since its first large-scale project, Union Street Urban Orchard in Bankside, London, which transformed a derelict site into a thriving community orchard of 85 fruit trees.
Aside from these projects, a key aspect of Wayward’s work is its laudable reuse scheme, called the House of Wayward Plants, which started out almost 20 years ago as a small plant adoption project, meant to engage people with plants. Wayward has now been the Official Reuse Partner for the RHS for almost ten years, redistributing thousands of plants, trees and materials each year from RHS flower shows, including Chelsea, to community groups and gardens, schools and hospitals.
Next year is set to be even more exciting, as Wayward is currently working on a site in Colindale, in collaboration with Notting Hill Genesis, which is providing funds and land to build a large new community garden. It will also act as a five-to-ten-year home for the House of Wayward Plants project, which will be built out of waste plants and materials from RHS shows.“We can’t wait to help rehome more plants and materials and become a new hub to support community gardens and schools across the city,” says Thomas.
Lee Connelly
Lee, known as The Skinny Jean Gardener, didn’t get into gardening until he was in his mid-twenties, when the opportunity arose to build and grow an allotment with his brother. “As as kid, I didn’t have much access to outdoor spaces or gardening,” he says. “I didn’t even know how potatoes grew until I started growing them myself.”
His passion lies with getting children into gardening; something that was sparked when he became the gardener for BBC Blue Peter and a father at the same time. Since then, he has appeared on BBC Teach and BBC Radio 1 to discuss the topic and has written How to Get Kids Gardening. He is also the House of Lords Expert on Children’s Gardening, and in 2023, he was named the UK’s leading children’s gardening educator.
As part of his commitment to teaching the next generation of green fingers, he founded School Gardening Success in 2021, a programme that brings gardening into primary schools and teaches children to grow their own food and how to look after wildlife.
“I wanted to create a programme that really empowered schools to embed gardening into their culture,” he says. Schools get access to online guides, videos and expert support, and receive a raised bed along with tools, compost and seeds so that the class can start growing straight away. “It needed to be something easy to adopt, where teachers didn’t feel overwhelmed or underprepared,” says Lee.
The programme has been transformative for hundreds of children; some have been so enthusiastic about what they’ve learnt that their parents have set up gardens at home, and many schools have launched gardening clubs because the children want to spend more time growing. Through his continued advocacy work, Lee hopes that gardening will become an essential part of the curriculum in the future.
skinnyjeangardener.co.uk; schoolgardeningsuccess.co.uk
Alla Olkhovska
Alla Olkhovska is a seed producer and photographer based in eastern Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv. Since 2022, the city has been a major target in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and many have fled the area. Alla continues to live there and cultivates a garden and seed business in the middle of the war. Her great-grandfather, Dmitriy, created Linden Grove Gardens in Kharkiv in the late 1940s and it was initially devoted to the production of fruit to feed the family and to trade.
The garden has been a constant presence in her life and Alla now uses the space as a trial ground for her ornamentals. She grows a choice selection, including around 140 different Clematis (the subject of her e-book), species peonies and rare perennials and bulbs.
Before the war, she had been researching naturally occurring variations of Scilla siberica in the local forests, selecting unusually coloured forms and growing them on. The forests now contain land mines and have become no-go zones, but she hopes to continue this work in the future. “We weren’t able to leave and I still can’t understand how we managed to survive,” she says. Her husband encouraged her to keep on growing and to share her experience, which she does through social media.
Even in the darkest times, cultivating beauty and capturing moments of nature can serve as a powerful antidote to despair
Through her photographs of the garden and close-ups of her favourite plants, she documents her growing journey under conditions that are unimaginable to many of us. In her online shop, Alla continues to sell seeds and copies of her original images to help support her family.
“Despite the challenging circumstances, I am determined to continue pursuing these creative outlets as a means of resilience and hope. I believe that even in the darkest times, cultivating beauty and capturing moments of nature can serve as a powerful antidote to despair.”
Instagram @allaolkhovska
Rosie Atkins, Project Giving Back
Rosie is the chair of Project Giving Back, the non-profit, grant-making scheme that gives other charitable organisations the funding and support to create show gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The charity originally pledged to fund 42 gardens at the show over three years (2022-2024) with an investment of around £12 million. The success of the scheme has prompted the anonymous founders to commit to two additional years of funding, with the aim of supporting 60 gardens in total, up to the 2026 show.
This is just the most recent example of years of charitable involvement for Rosie. The founding editor of Gardens Illustrated in 1993, she left the magazine after ten years to become curator of Chelsea Physic Garden. While there, she trained as an RHS show judge, and has been a member of, or chaired, various RHS committees, including the Bursaries and Awards Committees. Rosie has also served on the board of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, Thrive, the Professional Gardeners Trust and the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, of which she is now vice president, and was also on the council of the Linnean Society.
In March this year, Rosie was awarded the Elizabeth Medal of Honour. The award was established in 2023 by HM King Charles III, in memory of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and enables the RHS Council to honour UK non-horticulturists (and international horticulturists) who have had an impact on the advancement of the science, art or practice of horticulture for the benefit of all generations and the environment.
Keely Siddiqui Charlick, Sunnyside Rural Trust
Keely is CEO of Sunnyside Rural Trust, a Hertfordshire charity and social enterprise that offers training and work experience to people with learning disabilities and those on the neurodiverse spectrum. It was founded in 1990 as a small horticultural project, and now offers services to more than 170 people a day across four sites.
Trainees can acquire skills and employment in beekeeping, looking after chickens and larger therapy animals, growing plants and produce, landscaping and garden maintenance. They work on real projects, contract-growing plants, and are part of a thriving business – Sunnyside grows 45,000 bedding plants every year for Dacorum Borough Council, and sells a range of peat-free perennials to designers and the public.
It also runs a veg-box scheme and sells organic products made from produce that trainees have grown. Recently, the trainees have started working out of a new nursery space at Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith’s Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity, and Health. The charity prides itself on spotting people’s strengths and skills, then building on them – something Keely is passionate about.
A plant humbles you and in that space you can find a lifeline. To see people lifted up by their work and in a garden, alive and thriving, is a thing of beauty
She has helped transform Sunnyside from a small day service into a successful social enterprise. “I see people transformed by the smallest of tasks such as tending a cutting,” she says. “A plant humbles you and in that space you can find a lifeline. To see people lifted up by their work and in a garden, alive and thriving, is a thing of beauty.”
Keely received the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2021, and wants to use Sunnyside Rural Trust to inspire other charities to move into trading, and create employment opportunities for other vulnerable young people and adults.
Rowena Ganguli and Carina Millstone, The Orchard Project
Rowena and Carina founded The Orchard Project (formerly the London Orchard Project) in 2009, inspired by a shared vision of filling the UK’s capital with fruit trees. The aim of the project remains simple: to bring neighbours together to nurture their local environments into productive, resilient and beautiful spaces.
“The Orchard Project was born from a vision of abundance of fruit, of wildlife, of community relations,” says Carina. “Starting in my home city of London, it’s been thrilling to watch the project grow over the years and to see this vision become reality in communities across the UK, especially in areas lacking in access to green space and nature.”
Since its inception, The Orchard Project has helped to plant and restore more than 600 orchards and approximately 3,500 fruit trees – reaching thousands of people and their local communities
Since its inception, The Orchard Project has helped to plant and restore more than 600 orchards and approximately 3,500 fruit trees – reaching thousands of people and their local communities. It has also trained 400 orchard leaders, who are responsible for the implementation of the charity’s orchard management plans.
The charity aims for everyone in towns and cities across the UK to be within walking distance of a thriving, community-run orchard. Since the 1900s, the UK has lost 80 per cent of its traditional orchards, so as well as planting new ones, The Orchard Project restores neglected heritage orchards, breathing new life into run-down spaces.
The pair have stepped away from running the project now, but they are still ambassadors. Rowena, who previously worked as a fruit buyer at Innocent Drinks, is now working with multiple investors to create beautiful homes.
Carina continues to be a committed environmental activist in her community, and, in her day job, she serves as executive director at Feedback, an environmental campaign group working for food that is good for planet and people.
Jimi Blake
Conversations about immigration are always difficult, but especially so in Ireland at present. Gardener Jimi Blake, who created and runs Hunting Brook Gardens in Wicklow, believes there are 2,000 people seeking asylum in his local rural area alone, with 500 of them living in tents. On St Patrick’s Day weekend in March, before the usual city centre parade and festivities, a large camp of people who had been living on the street in Dublin were moved to a site near Hunting Brook.
Jimi was brought to visit by Green Party councillor Hazel Chu. “I was appalled at the way they were being treated,” he says, “and I wanted them to feel heard, and safe, and create a kind of community. I met the manager and some of the guys, and invited them to come to the garden for what we call a volunteer day, where we do some work in the garden and I teach them a little bit. The whole focus of the day is just to get out and have fun; a happy day, a chance to meet people, eat good food, play music and sing.”
The group usually comprises about 12-14 people, who come from countries including Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Jordan and Palestine. They visit once a week and do anything from pruning to pathwork, potting up, pricking out and deadheading. Many of the original group have already moved on to other parts of the country, but Jimi keeps in touch to follow their progress, and is delighted that one of his early volunteers loved gardening so much that he is now training professionally at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin.
As well as gardening at Hunting Brook, the group often visit other gardens together such as Ardán Garden near Howth, and have organised cultural and social events, including a beach barbecue.
Jimi plans to keep growing the initiative, and for it to be a support network as well as an opportunity for people to learn new skills and be in nature. “It’s all about the power of gardening, music,
food and community,” he says.
Instagram @jimiblake_huntingbrookgardens
Dr Richard Claxton, Gardening4Health
With a background working as a GP, Richard combines medical knowledge with a passion for the health benefits of gardening. A champion of the Social and Therapeutic Horticulture movement, he created what he describes as the first NHS-financed therapy garden. Staff members and volunteers would support visiting ‘gardeners’ suffering from depression and anxiety, or with physical disabilities, over 10-week-long courses. Any produce went home with the gardeners or to the local food bank.
In 2018, in an effort to make sure people across the rest of the UK have access to the same horticultural benefits, Richard set up the Gardening4Health directory, bringing together in one place information on more than 400 green spaces offering therapy. His goal is to turn it into a charity; a network of therapy gardens benefitting from financial support and shared knowledge.
Richard is also a trustee of Greenfingers, which builds specialised gardens for life-limited children and their families in hospices across the UK.
Richard is also Gardens Illustrated's new health columnist, sharing insights into how gardening is good for you each month in the magazine. Any spare time he does have is spent volunteering, leading garden tours at Sissinghurst and working towards a garden design diploma so he can offer clients advice, planning and project management services - all with therapeutic benefits in mind.
Joshua Sparkes
Natural farming champion Joshua’s journey in growing began in 2012, after serving in Afghanistan with the Royal Air Force. Pursuing a career change, he studied horticulture and began working as a gardener under the guidance of Troy Scott Smith at Sissinghurst.
He worked his way up to head gardener at Forde Abbey in Somerset, and along the way took advantage of fellowships allowing for international horticultural research. He was granted both the National Trust Hidcote Manor Garden TRIAD Scheme Fellowship for a year’s study across the UK, US and Japan; as well as The Churchill Fellowship to examine regenerative horticulture, soil management and composting in Pennsylvania, US. On these trips, he learned much about the type of horticulture he did and didn't like and discovered natural farming methods.
Now manager of the organic Birch Farm in Devon, Joshua grows produce and cut flowers for the Farmers Arms pub, which is also part of the Collective at Woolsery. He seeks to respect the local ecosystem and
mimic nature in his innovative approach to growing, and dedicates 15 acres of the 150-acre farm to experimentation, inspired by Japanese natural farming techniques. Traditional bokashi bins help turn waste into quality compost, and weeds and wildlife are allowed to grow amongst the crops, with the aim of creating a thriving, biodiverse ecosystem.
"Agroforestry and perennials have come to define our natural farming now," says Joshua. "Food forests, perennial vegetables and syntropic agriculture have become key themes as annual production becomes more unsustainable with our changing climate.
One important lesson I’ve learned is not to separate myself from the ecosystem. We as humans are just as much a part of it, and compassionate intervention is just as important as the mole or worm."
Instagram @joshua_sparkes
Miria Harris
Miria, a London-based garden designer, understands the power of spending time outside, especially for those with health issues. After suffering a stroke at the age of just 44, she found working outdoors to be a welcome escape from the hospital environment she’d known during her recovery, and used her own experience to design the Stroke Association’s Garden for Recovery at the 2024 Chelsea Flower Show.
Miria is also a passionate advocate of sustainable garden design, and recently created an entirely zero-waste garden. She transformed a client’s garden without using a single skip - a rare feat in the horticultural industry. The existing plants, composite deck and concrete terrace were given away, recycled or reused, and new walkways were made from reclaimed wooden boards, supported with a sub base of crushed old bricks and slate chippings.
Read more about the project in our October issue. Listen to Miria reveal more about her journey, ethos and approach to garden design in our Talking Gardens podcast.
Adam Stoter
While Adam may have initially wanted to pursue a career in football, he discovered a passion for horticulture at the age of 21 and has since worked his way up to become assistant park manager for London’s Royal Parks. Having graduated from the charity’s horticultural apprenticeship - which he labels “the best decision of [his] horticultural journey” - he now mentors and supports up-and-coming gardeners taking advantage of the same scheme.
His aim? “To keep questioning how we might improve horticultural education and training at The Royal Parks and across London.”
Thanks to his dedication to the industry, Adam received the Freedom of the City of London last year and became a liveryman for the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, a guild dating back to 1345. He’s actively involved in its School Outreach programme, which encourages young people to consider careers across the huge range of areas within horticulture.
Adam also encourages garden owners to compare notes with their neighbours and share knowledge, as well as plants and supplies - a great way to create a sense of community in the local area.
Think we left someone out? We'd love to identify more horticultural heroes to celebrate, so if there is someone you would like to nominate, get in touch with the GI team on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and tell us all about them.
And if you fancy being a bit of a hero yourself, why not learn more about and support these incredible horticultural organisations that do fantastic work in the industry, supporting all sorts of important causes.
With many thanks to Tuppenny Barn, Hilldrop Garden, Oxford Botanic Garden, Chelsea Physic Garden and Malverleys where many of these images were taken.
