About
About Kitti Kovacs
Multi-Award-Winning Garden Designer
I’m Kitti Kovacs, a multi-award-winning garden designer and founder of Kitti Kovacs Garden Design, creating bespoke residential gardens in Surrey and across the Home Counties.
My work has been recognised at some of the UK’s leading garden shows, including RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, RHS Sandringham Flower Show and BBC Gardeners’ World Live, where my gardens have received RHS medals, Platinum and Gold awards, Best in Category awards and two People’s Choice Awards.
I also work with QVC as an expert guest on My Garden Escape, sharing ideas and practical advice about how thoughtful garden design can genuinely transform the way we live.
Based in Surrey, I design beautiful, individual gardens across Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire, Kent, South West London and the wider Home Counties, with selected projects further afield, including residential gardens in Hungary.
I believe a beautiful garden should do more than transform your home. It should transform how you feel. It should give you somewhere to slow down, reconnect with nature, spend time with the people you love and enjoy the simple pleasure of being outside.
My gardens are designed around the people who will live in them. From contemporary family gardens and elegant entertaining spaces to peaceful Water & Wellbeing Gardens, I bring together people, plants, water, architecture and nature to create landscapes that feel beautiful, welcoming and completely individual.
Through four-season planting, sustainable garden design, carefully considered spaces and thoughtfully selected materials, I create gardens that are not only beautiful to look at, but wonderful to live in.
Water and wellbeing
Water has become a distinctive element of my work. I love using it not simply as a beautiful feature, but to bring calm, movement and a deeper connection with nature into a garden, creating spaces where you can slow down, feel restored and recharge.
Water can also help make our gardens more resilient to a changing climate. Well-designed ponds and naturalistic water features provide a valuable source of water for insects, birds, mammals and other wildlife, while helping to create a cooler, more humid microclimate around surrounding planting during our increasingly hot English summers.
For me, water is therefore about much more than beauty. It can support people, plants and wildlife at the same time.
From art to garden design
Before moving into garden design, I spent more than 15 years in event management. Together with my background in art, it has strongly influenced the way I approach garden design, and the two now meet in The Wedding Garden. I have always been fascinated by colour, texture, proportion, movement and the way a space can make us feel.
I see a garden almost like a piece of art that you can step inside, a composition that changes as you move through it and evolves throughout the seasons.
At the same time, my experience as a mother of two has given me a very practical understanding of how gardens need to work for real people and everyday family life. Beautiful gardens still need places for children to play, friends to gather, dogs to run, food to be shared and quiet moments to be enjoyed at the end of a busy day.
I have a genuine passion for both people and plants, and listening to my clients is one of the most important parts of my garden design process. I want to understand what they love, how they live and what they would like their garden to bring into their life.
Sometimes it is more time together. Sometimes it is somewhere peaceful to escape to. Sometimes it is a garden filled with life, colour and nature. And very often, it is all of these things.
For me, successful garden design is where creativity, practicality and emotion come together.
Garden design on a national stage
Show gardens are an exciting and important part of my work as a garden designer. They give me the opportunity to experiment with ideas, planting, water, materials, sustainability and new technologies at a very high level, and then bring that experience and inspiration back into the residential gardens I create for my private clients.
In 2026, 100 Sweet Summers at RHS Sandringham Flower Show received an RHS Silver-Gilt Medal and the RHS People’s Choice Award for Show Garden.
At BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2025, QVC’s Reflective Retreat received a Platinum Award, Best Commercial Garden and People’s Choice Award.
At RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2025, my show garden ILLUSION 2050 received an RHS Silver Medal.
QVC’s Reflective Retreat was also recognised at the 2026 Pro Landscaper Project Awards, winning Best Temporary Installation.
What I believe
I believe gardens have the power to improve everyday life. They can give us somewhere to escape without going anywhere. Somewhere to entertain and connect with the people we love. Somewhere to watch wildlife, hear water and experience the changing seasons. Somewhere to drink a morning coffee in the sunshine. Somewhere to sit quietly after a long day. Somewhere to breathe.
My aim is to create gardens that become an important part of your life, places filled with memories, nature and moments you want to return to again and again. Gardens that help you feel calmer, happier, inspired and recharged every day.
Awards and recognition
I am incredibly proud of these awards, but one of the things that means the most to me is seeing people emotionally connected with the gardens I create. Watching visitors stop, smile, sit down, talk about a garden or tell me that it has made them feel something is very special. The two People’s Choice Awards are particularly meaningful to me for exactly this reason.
Ultimately, that is what I want to create for my private clients too. Not simply a beautiful garden, but a garden they love spending time in.
The full record, year by year, with the organisers’ own announcements.
What my clients say
“Kitti is a rare designer in that she truly listens to her client.”
She took the time to understand our family's requirements and translated them into an original garden that went beyond what we had imagined. The finished garden gives us enjoyment throughout the seasons while remaining easy to maintain. Her creativity, enthusiasm and ability to recognise the potential in a space made a real difference to the final result.
“Kitti guided us through a complex project with far more to it than we initially thought.”
Her design was inspired and refreshing, and she helped us find landscapers we could trust to bring it to life. Kitti remained involved throughout the project, offering advice and practical suggestions whenever they were needed. The finished garden exceeded our expectations, and we would happily recommend her to anyone considering a garden project.
“We wanted a garden that would support our family's wellbeing, a space where our four children, cousins and friends could come together.”
Kitti managed a complex build with restricted site access and delivered a beautiful garden for us. The planting is still young, but we can't wait to see how it changes through the seasons and grows over the years.
“Kitti completely transformed our rather unloved and derelict garden into a beautiful space that the whole family can enjoy.”
Her design was ambitious and far exceeded our expectations. Kitti was lovely to work with. She listened to our concerns and made changes when we requested them. She dealt with challenges calmly and was very clear throughout the project what the difficulties would be and how these would impact the work. This meant that we always had a good understanding of what was going on and we had no unexpected surprises. The finished garden is a wonder.
“Kitti's designs are beautiful! We fell in love with her ideas, drawings and can-do attitude from the start.”
Her team of landscapers is both friendly and professional. It was so refreshing to have polite and positive people working with us. Our project was complicated but they never gave up, always trying to find solutions. And at the end, Kitti gave us a complete plan of how to look after our garden, plants and trees in the future which is very helpful and completes the job nicely. We are very pleased with our garden and highly recommend Kitti and her team!
“Kitti helped us transform our back garden from a sloping expanse of lawn into a Mediterranean retreat.”
Somewhere we can spend time with the kids, entertain or just relax, with a sense that we are on holiday on the continent. Kitti is passionate, creative, hard working and a valuable partner in projects like these. Not sure what to do in a garden and looking for a change? Definitely give her a call.
“She has created a joyful space, which we never tire of gazing at and sitting and socialising in.”
We gave Kitti a design brief for a shady patio under the large pine tree and interesting colourful trees to obscure the views of neighbouring houses. This was achieved and the figure of eight which she designed broke up the rectangular shape of the garden into two main areas, which she filled with 93 different flowers, shrubs and trees, many of which were quite unknown to us. There is always something new going on.
“When we moved into our house in 2019, the front garden was very overgrown with large areas that had been left to go completely wild.”
We have since found out from neighbours that it had been like that for well over 10 years. It felt like a mammoth project and we had no idea where to start. I came across Kitti when she was working on some projects nearby. From the very first call, Kitti was warm and engaging and genuinely enthusiastic about the project. She worked with a contact of hers, Charlie Jackson, and between them they put together a comprehensive plan for clearing the overgrown areas and a new planting scheme that perfectly fitted the style we were aiming for. As well as putting in some fantastic new plants, Kitti and Charlie were skilled at making the most of what we already had in the garden, salvaging things that were worth saving and really bringing out the best in the existing structure of the garden. The result has been a complete transformation. It has gone from being completely wild and unmanageable to a beautiful space that we love to look out on and come home to. I have lost count of the number of people who have stopped on their way past to tell us how amazed they are at the transformation, it is so nice that it is now being noticed for the right reasons! It will only get better as the flowers start to come out over the spring and summer and we are really excited to see how it all develops. Thank you Kitti and Charlie!
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