A Celebration of the Gardens, Memories and Simple Pleasures That Stay With Us for a Lifetime
RHS Sandringham Flower Show 2026
RHS Silver-Gilt Medal
RHS People’s Choice Award — Show Garden
100 Sweet Summers is a nostalgic celebration of a lifetime spent enjoying the simple pleasures of a garden. The garden tells the story of a retired couple looking back over many happy summers together — gardening, travelling, entertaining friends and watching their family grow. Now, their garden has become somewhere to slow down. A place where grandchildren come to visit. Where favourite flowers bring back memories. Where there is time to sit beneath the trees, listen to running water and enjoy another summer together. At its heart is a garden designed not simply to be admired, but to be lived in and loved.
FROM VISION TO REALITY
The garden began as a detailed Photorealistic 3D Garden Design, allowing the composition, planting, structures, water and views to be explored long before construction began. The finished garden remained remarkably close to that original vision. For me, this is one of the great advantages of designing in 3D: it allows an idea to be experienced, refined and understood before the first stone is laid or the first plant goes into the ground. 100 Sweet Summers was designed as one complete landscape, with every element contributing to the atmosphere and story of the garden.
A GARDEN FILLED WITH MEMORIES
At the centre of the garden stands an oak-framed garden building, somewhere between a summer house, greenhouse and treasured garden retreat. It is filled with objects that suggest a lifetime of memories — travel, family, summers gone by and the simple rituals that make a garden feel like home. The surrounding terrace provides somewhere to sit and entertain, while a handmade macramé parasol creates welcome shade and the large suspended swing invites you to stop for a while. The garden deliberately combines a sense of nostalgia with contemporary ideas about how we can create outdoor spaces more sustainably. It is playful, colourful and slightly unexpected — but above all, it was designed to make you smile.
THE CRAFT BEHIND THE GARDEN
Many of the most distinctive elements of 100 Sweet Summers were made especially for the garden. The macramé swing, parasol and decorative curtains were created using more than three miles of cord and over 10,000 individual knots. Their handmade character brings softness, movement and personality into the garden, contrasting beautifully with the solidity of the oak structure and natural stone. The garden building itself incorporates more than 400 recycled wine bottles, arranged within the oak frame to create striking patterned walls. Light passes through the bottles throughout the day, turning something that would normally be discarded into one of the garden’s most memorable architectural features. For me, sustainability is most exciting when it becomes part of the beauty, creativity and personality of a design, rather than something simply added afterwards.
PLANTING FOR A SWEET SUMMER
Colour, Movement, Wildlife and Abundance
The planting was designed to feel generous, joyful and slightly nostalgic — reminiscent of the plants many of us remember from gardens growing up, but interpreted in a more contemporary, layered way. Much-loved garden favourites such as snapdragons, single dahlias, Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ and Pink Annabelle brought a sense of familiarity and nostalgia to the garden, alongside cannas, salvias, nepeta, eryngiums, ornamental grasses and other summer-flowering perennials. These plants weave through structural shrubs and trees to create a garden filled with colour, movement and texture. Deep reds, burnt oranges, yellows, pinks, blues and purples appear throughout the planting, while contrasting foliage gives the scheme strength and interest beyond the flowers. Himalayan birches, a Ginkgo biloba and Carpinus betulus ‘Fastigiata’ created height, structure and dappled shade, giving the temporary show garden a sense of maturity and helping it feel as though it had been growing there for years. The planting was also chosen with wildlife in mind. Single-flowered dahlias, snapdragons and other nectar-rich plants provided accessible food for bees and other pollinators throughout the show, demonstrating how a colourful ornamental garden can be beautiful for people while also supporting nature.
WATER, WILDLIFE & WELLBEING
Water runs through the heart of 100 Sweet Summers. A naturalistic pondless waterfall flows between large stones and through the planting, bringing movement and the gentle sound of running water into the garden. Water has a wonderful ability to completely change the atmosphere of a space. It encourages us to slow down. It reflects light, attracts wildlife and helps create a sense of coolness during warm summer days. The water system was designed to operate without chemical water treatments, using biological and mechanical filtration to maintain healthy water. It also provides a valuable water source for insects, birds and other wildlife and helps create a cooler, more humid microclimate around surrounding planting during increasingly hot summers. This idea — that water can support people, plants and wildlife at the same time — has become increasingly important within my residential Water & Wellbeing Garden designs too.
SUSTAINABILITY WITHOUT COMPROMISING BEAUTY
Sustainability was considered throughout the design of 100 Sweet Summers. Rather than treating sustainable garden design as a restriction, I wanted to demonstrate how environmental thinking can actually make a garden more creative, more interesting and more beautiful. The garden incorporated more than 400 recycled wine bottles, reclaimed scaffold boards, natural stone, permeable surfaces and a chemical-free water system. No concrete was used. Materials and garden elements were selected with their life beyond the flower show in mind, allowing them to be reused or repurposed rather than simply discarded after the event. The planting provided food and habitat for pollinators, while layers of vegetation helped create shade and a more comfortable microclimate. The garden also explored innovative technology through Bioo, demonstrating how electricity can be generated through natural biological processes within soil and used as part of the garden’s lighting. For me, 100 Sweet Summers was an opportunity to show how nostalgia, craftsmanship, sustainability and emerging technology can happily coexist in one garden.
DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE
Despite all the planting, craftsmanship, sustainability and innovation behind 100 Sweet Summers, the most important part of the garden was always how it made people feel. I wanted visitors to imagine themselves there — sitting on the swing, sharing a drink with someone they love, listening to the water, remembering a garden from their childhood or simply enjoying the flowers. During the show, people stopped, smiled, sat down, talked about memories and often told me how much the garden resonated with them. Many visitors even said they would happily take the garden home exactly as it was. Receiving an RHS Silver-Gilt Medal was a wonderful recognition of the design and the enormous amount of work that went into creating it, but winning the RHS People’s Choice Award — Show Garden felt especially meaningful. For a garden built around memories, happiness, family and the emotional connection we have with our outdoor spaces, knowing that it connected so strongly with the public felt like the perfect ending. For me, successful garden design is not simply about creating something beautiful. It is about creating somewhere people want to be.
FROM SHOW GARDEN TO YOUR GARDEN
You don’t need an enormous garden to create an outdoor space that can transform the way you live. 100 Sweet Summers was built on a plot of just 9 × 11 metres — only 99 square metres, smaller than many of the private gardens I design. Yet through careful planning, the garden included everything you might want from an outdoor space: shelter from the sun and rain, an entertaining area, an outdoor terrace, abundant planting, running water and a swing for somewhere to simply stop and relax. Each area had a purpose, but everything was designed to work together as one coherent landscape. The garden never needed to feel crowded or compromised simply because the space was limited. In fact, one of the comments I heard again and again from visitors was: “I would take this garden home exactly as it is.” For me, that was one of the loveliest compliments the garden could receive. It demonstrated something I strongly believe in: The size of your garden does not determine how much it can give you. With thoughtful design, even a relatively compact garden can provide places to relax, entertain, reconnect with nature, enjoy beautiful planting and water, and spend meaningful time with the people you love. You don’t necessarily need more space. You need to make the space you have work beautifully for you.
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