Graduates, current students, and tutors from our Garden Design Diploma are making their mark at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. With innovative show gardens and standout designs, we celebrate the creativity, skill, and dedication cultivated here at our School of Design.
Every year RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival features a 'Pocket Planting' category which showcases sensory and smaller gardens. This year we have three KLC graduates invloved in two of the gardens. Nathan Humphreys and Helen Haley, graduates from the class of 2024 co-designed 'Before the Concrete Sets' and Tom Pilgrim from the class of 2022 created 'Hot Pocket'. Tom and Helen share their journeys and inspirations behind their gardens:
Tom Pilgrim - Hot Pocket:
"I am a garden designer based near Hampton Court in Surrey. My background and education is in fine art obtaining an MFA in painting and a subsequent career in exhibition management and operations followed within the commercial art world. During this time a garden which I inherited when we moved to a new home had been left completely untended. Through cultivating this space with allot of trial and error and learning how to garden ultimately became a space where I could de-stress and reconnect with nature but also a new creative outlet to experiment and engage with my passion for plants and gardening.
During lockdown I decided to retrain and started looking for a reputable colleges and courses that I could learn the fundamental principles of how to design and obtain the necessary foundation in using CAD and broadening my knowledge in Horticulture. I was drawn to KLC as their course is very much focusd on getting you 'industry ready' in what was a very intensive 1 year of studying part time although to be hoest it was very much full time!
From the beginning my main intention was to set up my own business as a garden designer. In 2023 I started Tom Pilgrim Garden Design and have been slowly but steadily building up my business and also working as a free-lance designer and gardener for other garden designers. Whilst at KLC we were also encouraged to get involved in working on show gardens as they are a big focus of the industry and being that i really enjoy working in a very creative context I wanted to have a go and did my first flower show at RHS Tatton Park last year where I won Gold and Best Long Border which was an amazing experience! This year I am exhibiting at RHS Hampton Court in the City Pocket Planting category and fingers crossed I do ok but i'm not just going for gold, the experience is everything for me to grow as a designer and hopefully grow my business too. "
- Tom Pilgrim
Helen Haley - Before the Concrete Sets:
The Garden: Inspired by Surrounding Counties' hometown of Didcot, where rapid urbanisation threatens to erase the soul of the place, our garden asks a bold question: why wait until a town has become a city to reclaim green space? Cities around the world are now playing catch up, racing to restore nature where it has long been erased. But what if, as our towns grow, green infrastructure grows with them, not as an afterthought, but before the concrete sets?
Our garden will feature materials often left over at the end of construction projects, showing how these can be upcycled into something beautiful and useful. The planting is inspired by the chalk grasslands of the North Wessex Downs, rooting the garden firmly in its intended location, and showing how a small space can teem with beautiful biodiversity: the very opposite of the neatly mown lawn and sculpted mounds so often found in new developments.
About Helen: After a decade working as a solicitor, but spending every spare moment in the garden, I gave in and decided to retrain as a gardener. I gained my RHS Level 2, and worked for a year in the beautiful gardens of Hever Castle, as part of the WRAGS training scheme.
Garden design seemed like an obvious next step, combining my passion for plants with my love of drawing, and the problem-solving, analytical and communication skills developed during my legal career. The KLC Garden Design Diploma appealed to me because it aims to prepare students for work (including all the necessary software skills). However, the best things about the course turned out to be the diversity and quality of the tutors and speakers, many of whom have hugely influenced our Hampton Court garden; and the connections with my fellow students, many of whom I hope will be friends and collaborators for life.
Since I completed the course in December 2024, apart from my work on the Hampton Court garden, I have been designing gardens for private clients, and I'm really enjoying the process of seeing some of my designs come to life.
– Helen Haley
KLC School of Design has collaborated with the RHS on a new feature at this year’s Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival called 'the Creative Cubes'. This new category was open to KLC Garden Design Diploma students and graduates, giving them the opportunity to explore the theme of “Colour” within 3m x 3m cubes. The Creative Cubes highlight a range of ideas and personal interpretations, and we’re proud to see the creativity and thoughtfulness our designers have brought to this collaboration.
Jonny Lincoln - ‘Pocket Potager’:
Garden brief: ‘Pocket Potager’ demonstrates how even the smallest spaces can blossom into areas of both beauty and practical use. The garden highlights the potential for a continuous harvest on a micro scale with ornamental and edible plants growing harmoniously side by side; offering the delight of homegrown cut flowers, culinary and medicinal herbs, and vegetables throughout the year. The garden is inspired by French kitchen gardening and the subtle blue-green hue of productive vegetables which provide a complimentary and calming palette against accents of white and pink. Natural and reclaimed materials are used throughout to provide a sense of relaxed rustic charm.
I have always been passionate about the outdoors and gardening in particular - green spaces are where I naturally gravitate to and feel most comfortable in fully expressing myself creatively. After 10 years working in film production, I decided it was the right time to transfer my skills into my passion and I retrained in horticulture and garden design. I am driven to create lasting, beautiful and thoughtful green spaces that reconnect people with the natural world and enrich their experience of the outdoors.
KLC stood out to me as the best option as it is industry-focused which was important when taking the big step of transitioning career paths. The mix of professional tutors and course leaders who are active in the industry, varied projects, technical and creative skills development and practice with project and volunteer experience set me up to both deliver my creative vision and confidently go out into the professional world.
Soon after graduating I won a competition to redesign the planting of the historic Chapel Court within the grounds of Hampton Court Palace, which featured a fresh take on a Tudor knot garden and was planted in December 2024. I have also been working as an in-house garden designer for acclaimed landscape architecture studio del Buono Gazerwitz since April 2024 which has further developed my technical skills especially in construction design management and given me a broad experience of projects across the UK, Europe and USA. Alongside this I am growing my own small practice, Green Notes Garden Design. Through the course I developed a small community, and it continues to be helpful having the continued guidance of the KLC course leaders and the support network of my peers.
- Jonny Lincoln
Robert Pryor - 'Wild Beasts, A Colourist’s Garden':
My path into garden design has been a squiggly one. Taking the long way round, I started in engineering, spent time in fashion and music, then over a decade in advertising. I loved the buzz of agency life, but things shifted after the pandemic. My mum died, I became a dad, and I decided to take some time out to be at home with my children.
Shortly after this I signed up for a garden design course at KLC, originally just to keep my brain ticking over. But it quickly became clear to me that it was an industry I wanted to work in. I moved from the open learning course to the diploma after meeting students and grads and seeing their work. The diploma at KLC was tough but immensely rewarding, giving me the confidence to start my own design practice, Hydeborn Garden Design.
My highlights so far: I’ve been lucky to work with some lovely clients, win 'Best Project' for my diploma show garden, and most recently, design my first show garden at RHS Hampton Court. The journey continues to be a squiggly one or perhaps its just the scenic route!
-Robert Pryor
Kiera Jamison and Alana Sims - 'The Golden Garden':
Do you include yellow plants in your garden? We hope to inspire you to do just that.
The 'Golden Garden' celebrates the rich possibilities of this vibrant, cheerful colour with a wonderful palette of plants, many of which are magnets for butterflies, bees and other pollinators. The analogous colour scheme combines hues of yellow-orange, yellow and yellow-green to create a joyful space, balanced with plenty of calm greenery. Bee posts, a log pile and a bird bath make the garden a stylish haven for wildlife, while a comfy chair enveloped in the planting creates a lush retreat for people too.
Garden Design Diploma tutor, Adolfo Harrison, designs an RHS feature garden.
Adolfo Harrison - 'RHS Vertigro':
Vertigro endeavours to re-imagine the possibilities of the urban vertical planting habitat and its place in our ever-warming and polluted towns and cities. The garden will feature towering vertical planting - an undulating corridor of living wall and climbers in a heliotropic race to the light. The plant palette will be peppered with species that accentuate a vertical arching growth, bending towards the sunshine, emphasising the extreme conditions of vertical planting.
Vertigro will celebrate the interface between people, nature, and the urban environment - connecting nature with architecture by adding drama and texture to the urban palette, while highlighting the benefits of urban greening and carbon sequestration that living Walls provide.
Light, form and movement are all at play within the garden, which will appear to wax and wane with the sun's path - plants straining with the arc of the sun and the shadows created by the totemic line of climbers morphing the garden's appearance.
In 2022, the RHS in collaboration with KLC Design School launched a competition to create a floral planter bench. Now in its fourth year, the contest to champion up-and-coming design talent is still going strong, returning with a new theme of ‘Floriography: The Secret Language of Flowers’.
Verity Smith:
KLC Garden Design student, Verity Smith, won a competition set by the RHS to create an engaging planting design for 30 benches at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. The theme of the competition is floriography, also known as the secret language of flowers, which is a system of assigning symbolic meanings to different flowers to express feelings or messages. Entrants were encouraged to create a design that struck a keen balance between visual impact and horticultural awareness. Verity applied the Victorian concept of floriography to the 16th century, to imagine which secret messages could have been shared between the most famous resident of Hampton Court Palace, Henry Vlll, and each of his six wives. Six floral, encoded designs were then created. Each illustrating a specific marital relationship, which to this day is remembered by the notorious mnemonic - divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. The designs are monochromatic; using various shades, tints or tones of one specific colour, to create a serene planting scheme. Visitors at the show are encouraged to explore the planters, to work out which flower represents each of the six queens.
-Verity Smith
Interested in Garden Design? Learn more about our one year part-time Diploma here.
