Gardens of the Future

Andy Sturgeon is a garden designer, landscape architect, plantsman, broadcaster and author, whose boutique practice has created a space where garden design and landscape architecture intersect. Founded in 1988, the studio’s work includes complex private and public commissions on all scales, many in historic settings: from hospitality and resorts to museums to high-end residential schemes and private gardens. It is a truly international practice. The studio also collaborates with artists and craftsmen, and designs bespoke water features, furniture, sculptures and buildings. Sustainability and climate resilience underpin all the work: Australasian, South African and species from Mediterranean climates are increasingly of interest. Among many awards, Andy has won nine Gold medals at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and three ‘Best in Show’ awards.

Ann-Marie Powell is a multi-award-winning designer who has been listed as one of the ‘Top 50 Landscape and Garden Designers’ for the last five years in a row by House & Garden magazine. In 2024 she created ‘The Octavia Hill Garden’, a Main Avenue Show Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which won both the BBC’s People’s Choice Award and the inaugural Children’s Choice Award. Ann-Marie started her innovative and energetic design practice in 1998 designing sustainable outdoor sanctuaries for private clients, companies and charities. Biodiversity is the cornerstone of all their planting designs, cultivating an environment that naturally attracts and sustains wildlife. Ann-Marie is also an author, journalist and presenter.

Anna Liu is co-founder of architecture and landscape practice Tonkin Liu with Mike Tonkin. She graduated from Columbia University and qualified as an architect in 2002. She is a trustee of the Open City charity and a Visiting Practice Professor at the Sheffield School of Architecture. Bridging teaching, research and practice, Tonkin Liu are storytellers who have established a reputation for award-winning projects that range from architecture to medical inventions and from artworks to landscapes: always with the ambition of bringing people closer to nature. Sunlight, rain and wind integrate as elements within architecture. Their storytelling methodology, ‘Asking, Looking, Playing, Making’, honed over twenty-five years of creative practice, is published by the RIBA 2025. The story is a vehicle for asking questions, looking for inspiration, playing with form, and making with innovative construction techniques.

Eelco Hooftman is co-founder with Bridget Baines of GROSS. MAX. landscape architects, who combine a Dutch sense of experimentation, a German sense of rigour and a British sense of humour. The international practice was awarded the European Landscape Award for their individual design concepts and part in shaping the style of landscape architecture in the early twenty-first century. Projects with relevance to botanic gardens include master plan proposals for both Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (2010) and Wakehurst Place (2011), a gateway biodiversity garden at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2010), A ‘Garden for a Plant Collector’ at Xi’an International Horticultural Expo, China, (2011) and a master plan for La Salle Botanic Gardens, Philippines (2024). Eelco Hooftman is contributing to the landscape design of the transformative Eden Project Dundee. In 2009–18 Eelco was visiting professor at the GSD Harvard.

Ruth Chivers is one of the UK’s most respected garden designers and writers. Her design work has ranged from show and theme gardens open to the public to small gardens for new build houses in both the UK and Northern California. She has written and contributed to many gardening books and features for magazines, as well as articles online. She is a Fellow of the Society of Garden Designers (FSGD), with a special interest in contemporary garden design, 20th-century garden history and low-maintenance garden design. Ruth lives in Gloucestershire, and lectures on garden design and garden history.

Sarah Ebele is a decorated garden designer. She has won nineteen Gold medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. In 2007 she designed ‘600 Days with Bradstone’, a garden on Mars based on extensive research into what was scientifically possible and consulting with the European Space Agency. More recent show gardens have included the ‘Resilience Garden’ in 2019, teaming up with the Forestry Commission, which considered the biggest challenges facing the forests of the future, and ‘Psalm 23’ in 2021, a sanctuary garden that now has a permanent home at Winchester Hospice. She was awarded the Society of Garden Designers Lifetime Achievement award in 2022 and in 2023 was made a Vice President of the RHS.

Tayshan Hayden-Smith is the founder and creative director of Grow to Know, a changemaking and placemaking collective committed to local, national and global joy and justice. It was born following the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, a tragedy which saw young people turning to nature and community, with hope for change. In the face of adversity, this newfound activism inspired the beginnings of the not-for-profit Grow to Know. Born and raised in North Kensington, Tayshan’s work honours the gentle, yet strong willed, spirit of his late mother; while also planting resilient seeds of change for the future. Collaborators and friends of Grow to Know, include Will Carr, Daniel Dzonu Clarke, Prior + Partners, IMK STUDIO, Adam Ritchie, Seb Barros and Wolli Films.

Thomas Woltz is the owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) is an internationally recognized design practice with studios in New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia. Dedicated to aesthetic and environmental excellence, sustainability, innovation and truth-telling in the land, the firm uses design to reveal stories embedded in the land and facilitate the restoration of damaged ecosystems in public parks, urban landscapes and farmland. They place a special emphasis on the symbolic, ecological and practical potential of plants, water and natural process in the sustainable landscape.

Tom Massey founded his landscape design practice Tom Massey Studio in 2015. He has designed several award-winning gardens, including the ‘WaterAid Show Garden’ (in collaboration with Studio Weave) at the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which showcased the importance of sustainable water management in combating the effects of climate change. He was listed in House & Garden magazine’s ‘Top 50 Garden Designers’ and Country & Town House’s ‘20 Finest Landscape Designers’, and is a visiting tutor at the London College of Garden Design. In 2023 he released his first book, RHS Resilient Garden (DK), drawing on the latest RHS scientific research to advise individuals and organisations on how to future-proof their gardens. Tom’s second book, RHS Waterwise Garden, will be published in Autumn 2025.

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