Gardens of the Year 2025

It's time to reveal our Judges' Choice winner from the 2025 Garden of the Year competition, plus give GW readers the chance to vote for their Peoples' Choice favourite, to be announced in our March issue

- WORDS SONYA PATEL ELLIS PHOTOS JASON INGRAM

For more than a decade, Simon Richards has nurtured his Kent garden into an inspiring example of what resilience, creativity and patience can achieve. When he moved into his detached house 13 years ago, he inherited a traditional lawn and mature planting, but quickly realised the challenges of keeping grass alive through increasingly dry summers. Inspired by Beth Chatto's pioneering gravel garden, Simon dug up much of the lawn by hand, replacing it with a thriving, self-sustaining gravel landscape filled with grasses, perennials and wildlife. His arts background informs a thoughtful approach to rhythm, texture and repetition, while his commitment to recycling and low-intervention gardening keeps the space grounded in sustainability. Today, Simon's garden is not only a visual delight but also a haven for birds, butterflies, newts and even his cat, Mr Patch. It's a deeply personal sanctuary that continues to evolve with the seasons.

How big is your garden?

Our garden is attached to a detached 1929-built house. It's not especially big or small - roughly about 15 metres across and 24 metres long including a patio and terrace by the house, a central gravel garden with two ponds and a lower section of retained lawn.

How long have you lived here? We've lived here since 2012, so for about 13 years.

What was your garden like when you moved in? We inherited a very traditional garden that had a large central lawn with mature shrubs and trees around the edges. There was nothing wrong with it, but the lawn always went brown and died each summer, no matter how much effort we put in. We were fortunate to inherit mature trees, a sweet summer house with a Kent-tiled roof, a pergola, and an apple and pear arch - features that gave us a great foundation to build on.