Sarah Price has rapidly established herself as one of the most prominent and sought-after garden designers in Britain.
Drawing on a prior training in fine art and a life-long love of wild and natural environments, Sarah’s gardens have an immersive quality and are often described as ‘painterly’. Her practice is unusual for its breadth and scope of work.
Sarah co-designed the 2012 Gardens at London’s Olympic Park and was a planting consultant for LDA Design on the post-Games legacy design.
She continues to work on a number of large public planting schemes as well as private projects. These include new community gardens and an exciting ‘play’ landscape designed in collaboration with MUMA for Cambridge University; an “Art Garden” at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery sponsored by Jo Malone London (left); and a garden inspired by the New Forest for a new Maggies Centre in Southhampton designed by architects AL_A.
Sarah’s designs have collected numerous awards, most notably Gold Medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Showin 2018 (right) for her M&G Investments Garden and in 2012 for The Telegraph Garden, amongst many others.
Sarah is a contributing editor for Gardens Illustrated and also writes for House and Garden and The Telegraph. In 2016 Sarah was awarded Garden Columnist of year by the Garden Media Guild for her monthly series on landscape design.
Sarah is a visiting lecturer in planting design at the Department of Landscape at Sheffield University and has lectured at the New York Botanical Gardens, Kew Gardens, the Royal Academy, and The Royal Geographical Society in London.
She graduated with a First class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University in 2002 and from 2002 – 2003 worked for a year as a full time gardener at Hampton Court Palace, London.
Plants First
Prioritising plants over the built, hard landscape of a garden creates more opportunities for habitat creation, productivity, beauty, and importantly, carbon capture. Planting trees and hedges alone will boost biodiversity, suck in carbon, and deaden noise. Allowing areas of lawn to grow long will help retain humidity and soil moisture, improving habitat conditions for invertebrates and for species of moths and butterfly.
Local Craft
Traditional, slow, craft techniques are a counterblast against the blandness of mass production. Beyond their obvious romantic appeal, time honoured crafts such as weaving, hedge laying, hazel hurdles and dry-stone walling are sustainable, practical, adaptable, durable and in harmony with the geographic and cultural context of a garden. It’s not just about a reverie with the past; it’s also about reinvention, experimentation, and the forging of new collaborations with old traditions.
Waste as a valuable resource
In The Nurture Landscapes Garden, we make use of reclaimed bricks in low retaining walls, and old timber is repurposed as furniture. Even construction waste – such as crushed concrete and aggregates are used in the pathways and as a garden mulch. Consider using recycled sands and aggregates for informal pathways and as low fertility growing substrate for drought resistant, dry gardens whose plants develop deep reaching root systems, allowing them to thrive in the sun.
Water Capture
I often introduce shallow dishes of rainwater within my gardens. Carefully positioned, they mirror the sky and tree canopies, whilst importantly attracting wildlife such as birds, pollinators and mammals. Equally important is rainwater collection; water butts are easy to install and safely store rainwater from rooftops.
Dead wood and compost heaps teem with life
Instead of burning brash and garden clippings try creating beautiful and sustainable structures such as log piles, wood stacks and dead hedges; upright structures of woody cuttings woven between vertical stakes, a neat but dense habitat for birds and hibernating insects.
