Should landscape designers take responsibility for considering the climate crisis in how they create gardens?
Join Edwina von Gal, American landscape designer and founder of Perfect Earth Project, and Fergus Garrett of Great Dixter, for a conversation around how landscape professionals are responding to the environmental crisis.
Moderated by garden designer Joanna McKerr, Edwina and Fergus will discuss how we can deliver an environmental message in professional landscaping and gardening that recognises and respects the relationship humans have with nature.
Why not stay for dinner and treat yourself to our award-winning Garden Café? We recommend pre-booking a table to guarantee your space.
Speakers
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Edwina von Gal
Edwina von Gal
Edwina von Gal is a trailblazer in sustainable gardening and landscape design. As the principle of her eponymous design firm, she has created landscapes with a focus on simplicity, sustainability, and beauty for private and public clients around the world since 1984. She founded the Perfect Earth Project in 2013 to promote nature-based, toxic-free land care for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. Perfect Earth Project is an influential environmental nonprofit in the US teaching people how gardens can thrive using nature-based practices to maximise biodiversity and minimise harm. https://perfectearthproject.org/
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Fergus Garrett
Fergus Garrett
Appointed in 1993 as Head Gardener of Great Dixter by Christopher Lloyd, Fergus continues to keep the garden constantly changing throughout the season by trying out new plants and plant-combinations. Fergus believes in passing on his knowledge through national and international student- and volunteer programmes at Dixter and through worldwide lectures he gives every year. Fergus is keen on plant communities in the wild and especially plants native to Turkey. Among other honours, Fergus was given the Royal Horticultural Society Associate of Honour in 2008 and in 2015, the Veitch Memorial Medal for outstanding contribution to the practise of horticulture as well as the Victoria Medal of Honour in 2019.
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Jo McKerr
Jo McKerr
Jo McKerr is a gardener and designer based in Somerset. In 2011 she and her family bought a derelict 2-acre brownfield site on the edge of Bath. She has spent the last ten years slowly transforming the site into a beautiful progressive wildlife garden.
Jo uses her garden to experiment, write, and teach about managing landscapes that are ‘low intervention’ with high aesthetics, high garden craft and increased biodiversity. She cultivates her garden with a gentle hand, encouraging a noticing of the beauty of plantings that are better adapted to their environment, reinstate habitat and stimulate natural processes.
Jo is interested in how we might grow gardens that will have an ‘ecological memory bank’ and have some resilience and ability to regenerate as our weather and pollution events become more extreme. She is also concerned with how we can divest ourselves from ‘instant’ gardens and start to encourage a movement towards evolving gardens.
