TESTING GROUND

Emily Crowley-Wroe has used her own front garden in the Cotswolds to trial design and planting ideas

- WORDS CLAIRE MASSET PHOTOGRAPHS JASON INGRAM

How does a fledging garden designer showcase her work? She creates something amazing on her own patch, naturally. While Emily Crowley-Wroe was studying at the Cotswold Gardening School in 2020, she used her own garden as a testing ground for her emerging talents.

"I wrote a brief, like you would for a client"," she says. This approach paid off. Today, Emily has the garden of her dreams, and runs an award-winning practice, April House Garden Design, from her home in the Cotswolds. In 2024, she won the Fresh Designer Award for emerging talent from the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers.

This maiden project saw Emily transform her unexceptional front garden - with a large, flat lawn, narrow borders and a functional path from her parking space to the house - into an immersive plant haven.

This plot is bigger than her back garden, and was prime for transformation, having served as a play area with the obligatory trampoline when her two daughters were younger.

Emily kept the path but widened the borders and ripped out the lawn, opening up space for a seating area near the house and a greenhouse at the opposite end. In between, she added a snaking path that invites a slower pace and sensory appreciation of richly planted borders. "I wanted to feel like I was pushing past plants and slightly dwarfed by everything," she says. "I wanted it loose and free and a little bit wild and experimental. It was amazing to see it come off the page." Emily enclosed the garden with hedges of laurel, field maple and hornbeam.