Gardening heroine - Sarah Price
Who: A talented garden designer with a light touch, Sarah’s exquisitely sensitive planting style is informed by her empathy with the natural landscape. Her scope is wide ranging, from public planting design to private garden design and RHS show gardens.
Background: After completing a degree in fine art, Sarah was increasingly drawn to gardening– an interest that began during holidays in Wales with her grandparents. Garden design was a natural next step and after enrolling on a garden design course, she won an RHS competition to design a garden at Hampton Court. Her skills of observation and sketching and visualising ideas learnt at art college, plus her appreciation of the colours and forms of the natural world and how plants grow in the wild, were a winning combination. In 2012, Sarah’s Gold medal winning Chelsea Flower Show garden illustrated her atmospheric and romantic approach to planting, with a glade of silver birches underplanted with delicate cow parsley and other native meadow flowers. She went on to help design the high profile Olympic Park planting and her art-inspired urban sanctuary for Manchester's Whitworth gallery in 2016 was highly acclaimed. In 2018, Sarah’s Mediterranean-inspired garden for the Chelsea Flower Show didn’t disappoint, with its characteristic naturalistic planting combined with an artistic use of vibrant, earth tones, winning her another Gold medal.
Own garden: Sarah is working on various projects including a Horatio’s Garden in Cardiff for patients with spinal injuries, while bringing up her small children and breathing new life into the two-acre garden in Abergavenny she inherited from her grandparents. This work includes restoring the old glasshouses and creating a productive, but romantic, kitchen garden with wild and cultivated flowers and grasses such parsnip flowers, fennel and Briza media alongside fruit and vegetable crops. Her plan for the the rest of the garden is to create swathes of meadow-like planting rather than traditional borders and she is growing lots of plants including alpines from seed in order to experiment with new combinations. We can’t wait to see it!
