Garden Museum Literary Festival 2025

Friday 12 September

• William and Marianne Cartwright-Hignett with Iford Head Gardener, Steve Lannin

  William and Marianne Cartwright-Hignett with Iford Head Gardener, Steve Lannin

  

• Dalia Al-Dujaili on 'Babylon, Albion'

  Dalia Al-Dujaili on 'Babylon, Albion'

  

  Dalia Al-Dujaili is an Iraqi-British writer, editor and producer based in London. She is the online editor of The British Journal of Photography. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Dazed, GQ, WePresent, Aperture, Atmos, It’s Nice That, Elephant Art and more. She is the founder of The Road to Nowhere Magazine and in 2023 she was the Producer of Refugee Week. Dalia holds an MA Hons in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh.
  
  'Babylon, Albion' is a striking exploration of identity and place, Dalia Al-Dujaili considers what it means to belong in your land. Tracing the rich heritage of both the oak and the date palm, Iraqi marshes and Loch Ness monsters, Al-Dujaili marries Arab and Islamic mythology with the English and Christian pastoral. She draws from a rich array of sources to consider in a new light the communal lush, wild – and, at times, dark – places we share.
  
  A love song to Britain, Iraq and the body of earth we hold in common, Babylon, Albion is an urgent reimaging of what it means to be native.
  
  Image credit Seif-Ali Umaar, 2025

• Jinny Blom on 'Ways Of Seeing'

  Jinny Blom on 'Ways Of Seeing'

  Jinny Blom is a landscape gardener who began her London-based landscape design practice in 2000.
  Since then, she has created gardens and large estates all over the world. Her work, which focuses on conservation and the best use of land, has been celebrated internationally. She has created therapeutic gardens for the NHS charity CW+, most recently for the new ICU at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital where she is Artist-in-Residence. The garden forms part of academic research
  into the positive effects of biophilia on health.

• Ian Collins on Ronald Blythe

  Ian Collins on Ronald Blythe

  

  Ian Collins is a writer and curator. He has written numerous art surveys and award-winning lives of painters James Dodds and John Craxton. His latest biography,
  Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe, was Book of the Week in The Times. He lives in Suffolk and Greece.

• Allan Jenkins on 'Plot 29'

  Allan Jenkins on 'Plot 29'

• Cath Kidston MBE on 'From Greenhouse To Bottle'

  Cath Kidston MBE on 'From Greenhouse To Bottle'

  

  Cath Kidston MBE is the founder and creative director of C.Atherley, a British brand specialising in scented geranium body care products.
  
  After stepping down from her eponymous company in 2016, Cath built a greenhouse in her Gloucestershire home and filled it with geraniums, which have always been a lifelong passion of hers.
  
  In 2020, when lockdown hit, Cath busied herself taking cuttings and cultivating a multitude of varieties of geraniums, becoming fascinated by their breath of extraordinary fragrances. It was here that inspiration struck for C.Atherley. Unique in that each fragrance is matched directly from different varieties of the plant, C.Atherley products contain over 90% natural origin ingredients and are meticulously created from plant to product.
  
  C.Atherley has over 60 stockists across the UK and USA. Their flagship store opened in London W2 in summer 2024.
  

• Thomas Pakenham on 'The Tree Hunters'

  Thomas Pakenham on 'The Tree Hunters'

• Tom Stuart-Smith and Clare Coulson on Designer's private gardens

  Tom Stuart-Smith and Clare Coulson on Designer's private gardens

  

  Tom Stuart-Smith is a landscape architect and garden designer whose work combines naturalism with modernity and built forms with romantic planting based on close observation of nature. He read Zoology at the University of Cambridge before completing a postgraduate degree in Landscape Design at Manchester University. Tom has since designed gardens, parks and landscapes throughout the world.
  
  Projects in the public domain include several at Chatsworth, a new public garden at the Hepworth Wakefield, and the masterplan for RHS Garden Bridgewater, which is one of the largest recent garden projects in Europe. At Bridgewater he was also responsible for much of the detailed design of the central area of the garden. In London he has designed Jellicoe Gardens in Kings Cross, a new Islamic garden commissioned by the Aga Khan Development Network and Argent, opened in 2021, and the dramatic recasting of a garden by St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London with a large water basin at its centre, reflecting Sir Christopher Wren’s famous dome, opened in 2022.
  
  Clare Coulson is a garden writer for titles including the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, House & Garden, Conde Nast Traveller and Gardenista. She is co-editor and contributing writer of Blooms and The Garden Chef. Her most recent book, Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home surveys the private gardens of eighteen leading landscape architects and designers. She is also a lecturer in journalism at Central Saint Martins in London.

• Tessa Traeger and Non Morris on A Photographer's Garden In North Devon

  Tessa Traeger and Non Morris on A Photographer's Garden In North Devon

  

  Non is a writer, garden designer and wildflower hunter. She writes extensively on gardens and plants. She is Contributing Editor at House & Garden, writes regularly for Country Life and has a monthly column for The English Garden, taking over in 2021 from Katherine Swift (The Morville Hours). She has contributed to Gardens Illustrated, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Spectator Online. As a designer, her emphasis is on using plants to create atmosphere. As well as private gardens in London, Suffolk, Sussex and Oxfordshire, public projects include the Fox Garden at the South London Gallery, the Church of St Mary the Boltons in South Kensington and currently the Leach Pottery in St Ives. Based in London but frequently travelling in search of wonder, wildness and astonishingly flowery places, her first book, Flora Alpina, The Wild Romance of Mountain Flowers, will be published in 2027.
  
  Photo credit Rachel Warne
  

• Edmund de Waal on ‘After the leaves have fallen’

  Edmund de Waal on ‘After the leaves have fallen’

Saturday 13 September

• Mark Diacono and Lia Leendertz on Gardener Cooks

  Mark Diacono and Lia Leendertz on Gardener Cooks

  

  Mark is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food. He has written a number of award-winning books, including A Year at Otter Farm and A Taste of the Unexpected (which both won Food Book of the Year, and Garden Book of the Year); Sour (which was Food Book of the Year 2019 in The Sunday Times and Daily Mail, and nominated for a James Beard Award in the US) and Herb, Spice, and Vegetables. Known for growing everything from Szechuan pepper to pecans to Asian pears, Mark's refreshing approach to growing and eating has done much to inspire a new generation to grow some of what they eat. He was involved with River Cottage, appearing in the TV series, running courses and events at River Cottage HQ, and he has written four River Cottage books. Mark is a columnist for The Sunday Times, Delicious and Country Life, and his features have appeared in The Observer, Guardian, National Geographic, and others. He hosts the monthly Cafe Murano Book Club with Angela Hartnett, and writes to a global audience on his best-selling Substack: ‘Mark Diacono’s Abundance’. He is a figurehead of the food writing collective at Scribehound Food, and Writer in Residence at Limewood Hotel, England. His next book - Abundance - is published in August 2025.

• Kate Hext on 'One Lost Edwardian Garden and the Secrets it Keeps'

  Kate Hext on 'One Lost Edwardian Garden and the Secrets it Keeps'

  

  Kate Hext is associate professor in English literature at the University of Exeter. Her books include Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (2024) and a new edition of Oscar Wilde's plays (2025). She is currently writing a book about Great Ambrook's lost early-twentieth century garden, in South Devon.

• Clare Foster on 'Pastoral Gardens'

  Clare Foster on 'Pastoral Gardens'

  

  Clare Foster is Garden Editor at House & Garden magazine and a freelance garden journalist. After starting her career in book publishing, she spent nine years at Gardens Illustrated magazine (1996-2005), latterly as Editor. She has been at House & Garden since 2005, where she is responsible for all the garden-related content of the magazine. As well as writing about plants and gardens, Clare has always gardened herself, first on an allotment in London, and now in her garden in West Berkshire. She is the author of six books including most recently Pastoral Gardens (2024, Montgomery Press), and writes a weekly column on Substack.

• Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks on 'The Book Of Garden Flowers'

  Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks on 'The Book Of Garden Flowers'

  

  Angie Lewin studied Fine Art at the Central School of Art and has since become a highly regarded painter, printmaker and designer.
  
  Landscapes, viewed through intricately detailed interlocking plant forms, play a vital role in her work. Focusing on the structure of native plants and attracted to the relationship between these plants on an intimate level, she observes them through the seasons and how they are shaped by their environment. Based in NE Scotland, the mountains, woodlands and rivers of Speyside and the machair of the Outer Hebrides are the inspiration for much of her work.
  
  Working from sketches made on her daily walks she creates watercolours, linocuts, wood engravings and screenprints. She also designs fabrics and wallpapers for St Jude’s, a company which she co-founded with her husband Simon in 2005 .
  
  Her watercolours and prints illustrate a series of books written by Christopher Stocks and published by Thames and Hudson :
  ‘The Book of Pebbles’ 2019
  ’The Book of Wildflowers’ 2024
  ’The Book of Garden Flowers’ 2025
  
  She is a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, the Royal Watercolour Society, the Society of Wood Engravers and the Art Workers Guild.
  

• Ngoc Minh Ngo and Shane Connolly on 'Roses'

  Ngoc Minh Ngo and Shane Connolly on 'Roses'

  

  Considered one of the most poetic landscape and botanical photographers in the world, Ngoc Minh Ngo’s work has appeared in such magazines as The World of Interiors, T Magazine, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Cabana and House & Garden UK. Other than Roses in the Garden, she is the author of six books: The House of a Lifetime, Eden Revisited; In Bloom and Bringing Nature Home. Roses in the Garden (published by Rizzoli) and New York Green (published by Artisan). She has had solo exhibitions at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech and Wave Hill Garden in New York. She was the recipient of the Place and Spirit Award from LongHouse Reserve and the New York Botanical Garden’s Larry Lederman Landscape Photography Fellowship. She is the National Speaker for the Garden Conservancy in 2025.

• Lucy Moore on 'Christopher Gibbs: His Gardening Life'

  Lucy Moore on 'Christopher Gibbs: His Gardening Life'

  

  Lucy Moore is a historian and broadcaster, the author of ten books, principally biographies, on subjects that range from Indian princesses to field-working anthropologists to the dancer Nijinsky and the women of the French Revolution. She is also the niece by marriage of the antiques dealer, Christopher Gibbs, whose writings she edited in Christopher Gibbs: His World (2025) and whose gardens she will be discussing. For more information please go to lucymoorebooks.co.uk .

• Frances Palmer on 'Life With Flowers - Inspiration and Lessons From The Garden'

  Frances Palmer on 'Life With Flowers - Inspiration and Lessons From The Garden'

  

  A celebrated author, ceramist, gardener and photographer, Frances Palmer trained as an art historian at Columbia University and for the past 38 years, has focused on the process of changing ideas into form in her functional work – handmade ceramics. Her work is represented in leading private craft and contemporary art collections around the world and has been exhibited internationally. Her first book, Life in the Studio: Inspiration and Lessons on Creativity was published by Artisan in 2020. Her second book, dedicated to the subject of flowers in her work, will be published in 2025.

• Charlie Porter on 'Novia Scotia House'

  Charlie Porter on 'Novia Scotia House'

  

  Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. Porter co-runs the London queer rave Chapter 10, and is a trustee of the Friends of Arnold Circus, where he is also a volunteer gardener. He lives in London.
  
  

• Molly Williams on 'Jane Austen's Gardens'

  Molly Williams on 'Jane Austen's Gardens'

  

  Molly Williams is the author of Jane Austen’s Garden: A Botanical Tour of the Classic Novels; The Junior Plant Lover’s Handbook: A Green-Thumb Guide for Kids; How to Speak Flower; Taming the Potted Beast: The Strange and Sensational History of the Not-So-Humble Houseplant and Killer Plants: Growing and Caring for Flytraps, Pitcher Plants, and Other Deadly Flora. She is also the editorial director of ARTSCO Quarterly: A Southern Illinois Creative Collective—a new literary magazine that showcases marginalized voices from the rural region where she grew up. As part of the 2025 Gates Cambridge cohort, Molly will begin her PhD studies in October at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores controlled environments — glasshouses, conservatories, and container gardening — in nineteenth-century popular literature. She is an avid collector, gardener, florist, and teacher of many things, including writing.
  mollyewilliams.com
  @theplantladi
  Photo credit: Stephanie Susie