MIND, BODY AND SOUL

Innovative landscape designer Charlie Hawkes has created a garden for The National Brain Appeal to help people with rare forms of dementia

- Miriam Methuen-Jones

Even if hardy perennials and evergreens wilt under your care, you’ll have heard of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. It’s accepted as the gardening event of the year, the place to find new ideas and surround yourself with cutting-edge design. For the second year in a row, up-and-coming landscape designer Charlie Hawkes is creating a charity garden for the prestigious event.

Hawkes has had a varied career so far, having started out in a very different industry to the one in which he is now making his name. “It took me a while to get into it,” he admits. “I was good at maths at school so ended up doing economics at university. I thought I’d better get a job that related to my degree, so I got a place on a finance graduate scheme – and then had a midlife crisis after about a year.”

Hawkes quickly realised he was on the wrong path and, trying to work out his next step, he was weighing up a career in gardening or one in architecture. “Someone said: ‘you know, there’s a thing called landscape architecture’. I hadn’t heard of it. I suppose it’s not the sort of thing the average school careers advisor knows about.”

He ended up doing a Masters in landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art (“two years of study plus spending my summers gardening”) before embarking on six weeks at Great Dixter, the house built by Lutyens in East Sussex that was home to the great gardening writer Christopher Lloyd and is now a charitable trust.