Camila Klich & Marianne Mogendorff
Founders of Wolves Lane Flower Company
“Growing flowers in this country is a radical act,” says Camila Klich. “It’s an environmental and political statement. Eighty-five to 90 per cent of flowers sold in Britain are imported. Buying flowers that have to be shipped, flown or trucked in is unsustainable.” Camila and Marianne Mogendorff, her Wolves Lane Flower Company co-founder, grow cut flowers on their microfarm in north London for events and wholesaling to florists. The friends met at Cambridge, and previously worked in fashion production (Camila) and theatre (Marianne), but both had enjoyed gardening as children. “We used to laugh about getting away from our office jobs and doing a mucky job in gardening,” says Marianne. In 2013, she spotted a site and that dream became a reality. “We started selling flowers before we really knew how to grow them properly,” says Camila. “And that’s
why we tell people just to try it. We had epic amounts of failure.” Everything they grow is in season, there’s no artificial light, no chemicals. It’s an organic approach. Alongside summer’s bounty of roses, foxgloves and dahlias, they grow varieties not stocked in the big markets. “As British growers, we’re able to include the wild and weedier flowers,” explains Marianne. “We don’t grow things that we feel we should – we grow what we love.”
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Charlotte Molesworth
Gardener and artist
Out of an abandoned Victorian kitchen garden, Charlotte Molesworth has created a magical retreat stalked by fantastical topiary creatures. The former art teacher and her husband, Donald, moved to their “tumbledown” cottage in Kent in 1983. Using plants she’d collected and the yew seedlings she’d requested as wedding presents, she gradually nursed her “wonderful array of eyesores” into magnificent shaped hedges, which she continues to tend from the heady heights of her 9ft ladder. Charlotte refuses to buy new – “I don’t do shops” – and is adamant that you can make a garden without much money. “Don’t buy big plants,” she advises. “If you grow from seedlings or cuttings it’s better, but you must be patient.” Her five-acre garden is also home to a donkey, sheep, chickens, bees, a greenhouse and a wilderness, but it is the topiary that she gets most pleasure from. “The skyline is so much part of a garden,” she says.
Paula Sutton
Social media influencer
“I love being outside, and I feel a great sense of calm when I’m cutting hedges or digging holes, but I can’t claim to be an amazing gardener,” says Paula Sutton. “I’m an amateur lucky enough to be learning in a mature garden.” A former magazine bookings editor, Paula moved to a Georgian house in Norfolk 10 years ago with her husband and three children and began a lifestyle blog. Now, she and her immaculate green lawn – where she sets up Wonderland-style tea parties complete with vintage crockery and pretty linens – are a social media favourite, with more than 432,000 people following @hillhousevintage on Instagram. Established hedges give the garden its structure. Paula has softened the formality, swapping multicoloured flower beds, using lots of lavender, hydrangeas and foxgloves. “Inside and out, I have a casual and blousy style,” she says. Her next project is a kitchen garden – a formal potager with box hedging and raised beds. “This is all brand new,” she says. “But if I don’t get it right the first time, that’s fine. I’ve learnt that there is nothing as forgiving as a garden.”
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Cali Rand
Garden designer
Cali Rand may have had success as both a textile designer and a model – first gig, Stella McCartney’s graduate fashion show – but when you grow up on an arable farm and watch your mother make a garden out of a bare field, gardening is, as she says, “in your blood”. After eight years working for Alice Temperley and with two very young children, Cali felt the call of the green again and took a one-year course at The English Gardening School. She received her first commission while still there and hasn’t stopped working since. Her distinctive style mixes clean-lined structures with natural planting. “It’s liveable and timeless,” she says. “It’s not going to look dated.” As someone with severe dyslexia, she used to worry about remembering the Latin botanical names. “But with age, I realised I didn’t care. I know what I can do, I know what the plants do,” she says. “And seeing that people love the gardens helped me to get over that fear.” For Cali, gardening is about well-being and serenity. “It’s not flashy. It’s really hard work and most people who do it don’t earn much money, but it brings so much joy and happiness.”
Tania Compton
Landscape designer
One of the most stylish and admired garden designers in Britain, Tania Compton has redesigned the parterre at Longford Castle and the grounds at Reddish House, the former home of Cecil Beaton. She’s also Kate Moss’s choice for her garden in Gloucestershire – “It’s heaven,” says Compton, “she’s an absolute joy to work with.” Along with her husband, the botanist Dr James Compton, Tania lives at Spilsbury Farm in Wiltshire, where – out of former paddocks – she has created her own six-acre enchanted garden, complete with wild-flower meadow, a lake, ancient trees, a hazelnut walk and a Chinese painted bridge. “Sometimes I go out there and think, ‘My God, where the hell did you come from?’” she says. “There was no plan. I remember at the beginning I thought, ‘I’ll never get to walk through snowdrops.’ But now I can walk through carpets of snowdrops every year.” With the garden established and looking after itself, Tania is growing plants for food, for health and for natural dyes. “I’ve always known that plants are healing. I’m interested beyond their beauty now in plants that have extraordinary magical properties.”
Alexandra Noble
Garden designer
“The projects that strike fear into my heart are the ones where people request artificial grass,” says Alexandra Noble. “I do sometimes think, ‘Have you looked at my website?’” One glance should be enough to reveal that Alexandra is a true plantswoman – there’s not an artificial blade in sight. The 31-year-old trained as an architect but was drawn to the creativity of gardening. “Gardens are more like art, you can compose them,” she says. While finishing her masters, she entered a competition run by the BBC’s The One Show for an amateur to design a garden for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. She won, and was introduced to a new green world. Having worked for other gardeners, including the revered Luciano Giubbilei, she set up on her own three years ago and takes commissions for gardens of all sizes. “In terms of planting, my style is whimsical. I like to contrast how wafty those plants are with very hard, solid materials,” she says. She loves the optimism of gardening. “I like imagining what the future will look like… in the depths of winter, we’ll have a witch hazel with some cyclamen underneath it. It’s creating those moments that I find really exciting.”
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