Sadie's a busy bee designing gardens (From Worcester News)

Sadie's a busy bee designing gardens

11:16am Monday 28th June 2010 in

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IN the beginning there was Gertrude Jekyll, Victorian lady and daughter of a Grenadier Guards officer, who designed more than 400 gardens both at home and abroad.

Later came the avuncular figure of Percy Thrower and his pipe, but when Charlie Dimmock leaned over the lily pond, gardening was never going to be the same again.

Gardeners these days, by and large, do not wear hobnail boots or a collar and tie. At least not if they look like Sadie May Stowell. For this award-winning landscape designer from Whitbourne, on the Worcestershire-Herefordshire border, is one of the rising stars of British gardening.

Next month the 29-year-old will be featuring again at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, the world’s largest event of its kind and the younger and more relaxed version of Chelsea.

Catching a public mood, Sadie May has designed a garden in tribute to the British honey bee.

Sponsored by Copella apple juice, it will reflect the bee’s journey from plant to hive and it includes apple trees, wild flowers and and grasses as well as a host of bee-friendly garden plants.

She said: “I’ve always been interested in gardening since I was very young. My mother is a very keen gardener and I got my inspiration from her. She has a very big garden, about one-and-ahalf acres, and I started off by having my own little parts of it.

“I would design my own borders and beds and gradually it’s all grown from there.”

Sadie initially trained in fine art at Worcester College of Technology but then moved on to studying garden design at Pershore College. The combination of the two has led to her work being described as the use of plants as a palette to create inspired planting schemes.

With her background in fine art and training in both horticulture and landscape architecture, she brings an innovative use of form, colour and texture to her designs and planting schemes.

Brought up at Cradley, near Malvern, where she attended the local primary school and then Dyson Perrins High, Sadie first came to public attention in 2005 when she was the overall winner of Channel 4’s national garden design competition The Great Garden Challenge.

The following year she received a Three Counties gold medal at Malvern Spring Gardening Show for her Mediterranean-inspired promotional show garden called The Bowl of Olives.

Sadie made her first appearance at Hampton Court Flower Show in 2008, when she designed and built an RHS bronze medal winning show garden sponsored by Copella, which aimed to raise awareness of the declining numbers of English apple orchards, two thirds of which have been lost in the last three decades.

She said: “This time I decided to create a garden to celebrate the honey bee.

“The bee problem is such a big issue at the moment because they are disappearing at such an alarming rate. I thought of what I could do to help and have designed a garden that shows the public how they can attract bees to their garden; what plants to use and how to leave wild areas.

“It is how to create a bee supportive environment.”

Outside of her show and exhibition work, Sadie designs and builds gardens all over the UK. Which, presumably, makes her a very busy bee indeed.