Awards

As the Principal and founder of the prestigious Oxford College of Garden Design, I am delighted to welcome you to our new (and improved) website which now boasts a much more fluid navigation to all the information you need, a brand new Podcast introduction on what good design is all about from me and, coming soon, new student testimonials and samples of the work of our recent successful graduates.

Regular visitors to the site and my newly-introduced Blogs will already know that my wife, Carol and I were thrilled to win one of the “I Own Britain’s Best Homes & Garden” trophies for our private garden at Greystone, Oxfordshire.

This award was given by the Judges on the Channel 5 programme of the same name and, even better, we were one of three gardens linked in some way with the course to be selected which, we believe, is further proof that we really are the best garden design course on offer, anywhere in the World.

Sally Court joins the team for 2009/10

We are delighted to welcome Sally Court as our new Vice Principal. Sally Court established her practice in London in 1988. In 1995 she became a Registered Member of the Society of Garden Designers and was elected a Fellow in 2001 having spent several
years on Council.

To date she has received 14 awards for her show gardens. She lectures worldwide on all aspects of landscape design and currently has several projects abroad with Russia being one of her busiest destinations. Sally is also member of the Garden Writers Guild, and author of “The Modern Garden Makers” and “Roses in Modern Gardens” and currently has two more books in the pipeline.
www.CourtyardGardenDesign.co.uk

Student end of year exhibition

16th June 4-7 PM Gibbs Room, Oxford Brookes University. Click Here to download invitation.

Emily Garbutt

Our top student in the Class of 2007/2008 is UK-based, Emily Garbutt, who, thanks to her consistency and attention to detail throughout the course, has just graduated with an overall mark of 80%, the highest in the class and a mark that has earned her a much-deserved Distinction.

Congratulations to Emily!

We’ve an exciting project coming up for our new intake of students (2008/09) and I for one can’t wait to see the look on their faces when I tell them that the third and final project we will be undertaking in class in the Spring of next year will require them to come up with, among other challenges, a Peacock-proof Vegetable Garden.

The students will be designing a 3-acre smallholding tucked away in the Chiltern Hills about forty minutes outside Oxford where we hold our tutorials. The brief, which will also include a pond for the ducks and a sty for the family’s pot-bellied pig, is a dream-project for students getting ready to cut their teeth in the real world and will require them to marry both good space allocation with the family’s (and their menagerie of animals’) practical requirements.

In addition, the students will have to design new garaging and a new driveway which will illustrate an important design concept, namely that until you get these practical matters right, you cannot produce a workable design, however good your ideas.

OCGD TV Gardens Scoop!

An astonishing THREE of the twelve UK gardens selected for a new tv programme on the very best gardens in Britain have links with the Oxford College of Garden Design (www.ocgd.org).

They are, not surprisingly, Greystone; the two-acre stunning woodland Oxfordshire garden of Duncan Heather, designer, founder and principal of OCGD and his wife, the talented plantswoman, Carol, and the gardens of former OCGD graduates, Julia Kirkham and Kathy Brown.

The programme, Own Britain’s Best Gardens, is a Thames TalkBack TV production for Channel 5 and will be aired later this year (watch the site for details of when).
The presenter is the flamboyant Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen who has spent the last month visiting the gardens and, together with a panel of top judges, quizzing their creators on what makes these gardens so special.

If the tv producers are right, and 25% of the gardens chosen to represent the best in Britain have been designed by OCGD tutors or students, then what does that say about the course?

It says this really is one of the most prestigious garden design courses in the world (never mind the UK) and if you still need convincing, read on.

Class Of 2007/2008….Where Are They Now?

It’s less than a month since the OCGD post-grad intake of 2007/2008 wowed the industry with their end-of-term Student Exhibition and while the course is structured so that students complete a summer planting portfolio and so do not graduate before the Autumn, many of them are already launched and working on impressive projects.

For example, Susan Clark, (www.thegardenagency.uk.com) a journalist who decided to take to the OCGD course so she could write more knowledgeably on garden design, has been commissioned by the top UK film director Gurinder Chadha, (Bend It Like Beckham…and her new film is the quirky teen smash Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging) to design the outdoor space at her new Primrose Hill family home, including a large roof terrace, Japanese-style adult courtyard and kids’ play garden and Christopher James, a fellow Class of 2007/2008 student, has been snapped up by another former OCGD London designer and success story, Charlotte Rowe.

And as if that wasn’t glamorous enough, half-way through the course, student-turned-presenter,  Shatsi Sabri, landed her own tv garden series fronting a garden show for a Pakistani production company which has just been commissioned for a second series.

For more updates on Where Are They Now? for the Class of 2007/2008 and previous years, check in on the website where we’ll be posting interviews with OCGD students who have successfully launched design careers and for an insight into why they are so successful, register for update alerts for Duncan Heather’s new monthly blog.