I’m a London-based gardener.

My earliest growing memory is of sowing apple pips with my brothers, in pots on the windowsill of our top floor Glasgow tenement. Holidays were spent tailing my grandmother around her otherworldly garden in the far north east of Scotland. Later, when our family moved to a terraced house with its own small patch, my spare time as a teenager - on the sly, between the usual binge drinking and smoking with pals - was spent plotting and planting a Renaissance-inspired box parterre and a modest double herbaceous border, a damning riposte to the neighbours’ post-Ground Force decking and phormiums.

I came south, initially training in Illustration and Visual Communication between Camberwell, Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Then, a decade ago, I took on an allotment. I was reminded of how important it is to have my hands in the soil. So I jumped into horticulture full time, with year-long stints at the National Trust for Scotland and Cambridge University Botanic Garden, before a crucial, life-affirming period as a Great Dixter Scholar, spending the better part of two years immersed in the life of the pioneering East Sussex garden with Fergus Garrett, Coralie Thomas and their team.

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which Dixter opened my eyes and let everything about how I wanted to garden to fall into place: for beauty; for the good of the planet; generously, with an open mind; by learning the rules and trusting my instincts to break them.

After Dixter, I began working in an unusually expansive west London private garden - a country garden, really, on the Zone 1 borders - and as Head Gardener of a public garden designed by Sarah Price around an arts centre. Now freelance, I work across a diverse range of gardens and outdoor spaces, encompassing planting design, writing, and collaboration on one-off projects, but at the heart of it all is practical gardening.