As she publishes her first book 'How to Design a Garden' the award-winning garden designer Pollyanna Wilkinson talks to Jessica Jonzen about new beginnings and the home and garden she is creating for her sons.
A GARDEN DESIGNED BY STUDIO POLLYANNA, DEEPLY PLANTED FOR YEAR-ROUND INTEREST. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
Pollyanna Wilkinson is going through something of a purple patch. As the founder of Studio Pollyanna, the acclaimed and in-demand garden design practice, she has earned three RHS medals and won the People’s Choice award at both the Hampton Court and Chelsea flower shows. She co-hosts the much-loved The Ins & Outs podcast alongside interior designer JoJo Barr of House Nine, and is about to publish her first book, How to Design a Garden, a beautiful and practical guide to both designing and maintaining a garden and written in her inimitable no-nonsense yet relatable style.
If this wasn’t enough, her studio has also been selected to design the next Horatio’s Garden, the charity which is transforming the country’s spinal injury centres with beautifully designed gardens to provide comfort and calm in challenging times. Pollyanna’s appointment means she is following in the footsteps of some of the UK’s most celebrated garden designers including Tom Stuart-Smith, Andy Sturgeon, Joe Swift and Bunny Guinness. “I’m very honoured that Horatio’s Garden chose us. I love our day-to-day work but being able to design such a meaningful garden which is going to impact so many lives in such a positive way is really exciting.”
All this while living through the ten-month renovation of the Surrey home she shares with her two sons, aged ten and nine. “We've been we've been living in the bedrooms for the last six months,” she says. “I've not been able to have friends over or even a babysitter as I've not had any living space, so just to be able to live a normal life will be amazing,” she says. “We have lived in it throughout, much against JoJo’s advice, but I couldn’t afford not to.”
This is the home that Polly bought after her divorce, and her Ins and Outs co-host JoJo Barr has designed part of it. In turn, Pollyanna has just submitted her designs for JoJo’s garden, but they have insisted on paying in full for each other’s services. “I feel incredibly lucky and humbled and proud that the business is such that I was able to buy my own home, particularly as a woman – I think that's quite rare,” she reflects. “On the one hand, I absolutely love having a house where I don't have to ask anyone's opinion on colour schemes – it's all mine to choose in that regard, so we've got quite a girly kitchen going on with a big pale pink kitchen island. Every decision in the house has been mine, which has been very empowering and sort of a dream come true,” she says. “But on the other hand, it’s a big responsibility.”
At not-yet 40, Pollyanna has achieved a dizzying amount, especially when you consider that garden design is her second career. After graduating from Newcastle University, she “fell into a corporate job because I didn’t know what else I wanted to do.” She spent over a decade working for various law firms in marketing and client relations. “It was fine, but I just didn't like it very much. I felt that real dread every Sunday evening and I knew I wanted to do something else – I just didn't figure out what it was until I had my kids.”
POLLYANNA WILKINSON. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
Pollyanna’s sons were born close together and that forced her to make a decision about her career. “I knew I wanted to work, but I also knew that if I was going to be paying exorbitant childcare fees and being without them, then it had better be for something that I loved, rather than just something I was doing because I hadn't thought of what else to do,” she says.
While Pollyanna’s mother is an interior designer and her brother works in design, she didn’t want to follow in their exact footsteps. Her neighbour at the time was a careers coach and helped her to realise what her passions were. “I absolutely loved my garden, but I’d never thought I could do anything related to it as a profession,” she says. “For me, I only fell in love with gardening when I had my own garden, which I think is true of a lot of people. It was totally irrelevant to me prior to that.”
Despite growing up in a family of “wildly passionate gardeners” Pollyanna admits she “couldn’t have cared less” about gardening until she had a spot of her own. She started out growing tomatoes on the balcony of her rented Earl’s Court flat in her twenties and got the bug. At the end of her second maternity leave, she retrained as a landscape garden designer and immediately set up on her own. “A decade ago, flexible working or part-time jobs just weren't that readily available. There is no way I could have worked in a studio full time and got phone calls about norovirus every other day. So, my only option was to set up on my own, and the business grew with the kids, which was, frankly, an enormous privilege.”
Today, Pollyanna has a mostly female team who work flexibly from the studio in Pollyanna’s garden which she had built before any renovation work began on the house. Unsurprisingly, the garden is “just as important as the house, if not more,” she says. “We’ve completed half of the garden and are currently working on the other half together.” The ‘we’ she refers to is her partner, Colin, who is also a landscape gardener. “It's a real joy. We're both divorced and we very much fell in love bonding over gardening and our shared love of nature and gardens,” she says. “We're designing the main part of the garden at the moment which is great fun. It’s very special to have someone in my life who shares that passion.”
So how does an award-winning landscape gardener approach the design of their own garden? Pollyanna describes hers as a “typical suburban garden" which was originally all given over to lawn. She set about dividing the rectangular space into three, with one third lawn, one third her studio with a drought-tolerant garden, and another third to be “an entertaining and chill-out space in the sun.”
A COURTYARD GARDEN WHERE DIFFERENT FLOORING MATERIALS HAVE BEEN USED TO DELINEATE THE SPACE, AND A FALSE DOOR DIVES THE IMPRESSION OF A SECRET GARDEN BEYOND. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
Pollyanna is on a mission to encourage people to sacrifice more of their lawn for plants. “If you have too much lawn and too much paving by the house, you have too much void and not enough mass,” she explains. “Planting, water and structures are really the only way you can accomplish mass and it's that balance of mass and void which creates a really harmonious garden. And you also want to give people a reason to go into it.”
She finds that it is generally her male clients who are especially wedded to the idea of having a big lawn. “As a parent, I fully empathise. I've got two kids who do boot around a football and they do require space in order to exercise and keep them off screens. But as soon as they turn 18, the whole thing is being given over to plants,” she laughs.
Another mistake that Pollyanna sees people make is only planting the edges of their gardens. “Having narrow borders on the boundaries with a big swathe of grass in the middle means you're creating a runway which makes the garden feel smaller, narrower and not very interesting. We always encourage our clients to bring plants into the garden, through edging paving or pathways with them and being much braver with the scale of planting beds as well.”
She recommends a depth of 1.5 – 2m for flower beds in order to get rows of plants in. “That’s when you get that real wow factor, but it's also how you get seasonal interest, because you need enough space to get enough plants to span all the seasons.” So, what are her must-have plants? “I couldn’t be without grasses – I don’t think we have designed a garden which didn’t have them in. They provide breathing room for excitement in a garden. If you only plant showstoppers like peonies, you’ll have fleeting beauty but a dull landscape the rest of the year. Grasses act as the perfect backdrop, while roses, although they’re divas, are timeless. I love weaving them among grasses and perennials for a meadow-like feel. The Generous Gardener by David Austin is such a classic and I’ll be covering my house in climbing roses as soon as it’s been clad and painted. My plan this year is to grow cut flowers and 'edimentals' (beautiful plants you can also eat, such as fennel and nasturtiums) in amongst the border.”
Bulbs are also a garden essential for Pollyanna. “They’re much neglected and often underestimated. Summer is over so quickly in the UK and bulbs can span seven or eight months if you're clever, and they’re incredibly low maintenance. They herald the joy of the seasons; if you focus too much on summer, you'll miss the good stuff during the rest of the year.”
Which sounds rather like a good rule to live by.
RAISED BEDS FILLED WITH NATURALISTIC PLANTING. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
DEEP GARDEN BORDERS CREATE A FEELING OF ABUNDANCE IN THIS GARDEN DESIGNED BY STUDIO POLLYANNA. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
POLLY ADVISED LIMITING THE AMOUNT OF PATIO SPACE POSITIONED RIGHT NEXT TO THE HOUSE, ENCOURAGING SEATING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE GARDEN TO GIVE PEOPLE A REASON TO VENTURE INTO IT. IMAGE: RACHEL WARNE
How to Design a Garden by Pollyanna Wilkinson is published on 6 February 2025 by DK, RRP £22. Photography by Rachel Warne.
