The Long Walk
A pergola walk for a rectory near Halesworth.
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Garden & Botanical Design
Coastal gardens, country gardens and installations that let the plants do the talking.
A dunlin feeds where the tide has just been, on ground it has read properly. That is the approach here. Planting chosen for the place it will actually live, drawn by hand so you can read it, and visited through its first year until it holds.
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Gun Hill
A Southwold courtyard that had to work in a gale.
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Blythburgh Hall
A parterre restored from a 1920s photograph.
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Dune House
A drift garden on sand, two fields from the sea.
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Walberswick Cottage
Cottage planting around a flint house.
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The Old Orchard
Woodland edge, rhododendron and a mown path.
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Gardens of every size, from a Southwold courtyard to the grounds of a hall, and botanical work for interiors: a restaurant in Aldeburgh, a hotel in Walberswick, a wedding barn near Bungay.
Recent collaborations include the interior designers Fenn & Hale, and the architects Ostler Rowe.
Garden and landscape design
A site visit, a survey, a hand-drawn masterplan and a planting plan you can hand to a contractor. From a courtyard to twelve acres.
Botanical and floral design
Installations for interiors that live for months, not days: branches, grasses, dried and living material, changed with the season.
Plant selection and sourcing
Plants bought from six East Anglian nurseries I know, delivered in the right week, laid out in the beds before a spade goes in.
Installation management and the first year
I manage the contractor, plant the borders with my own team, and come back each season for a year to edit what the garden decides to do.
A garden is never finished.
The ones I make are meant to move: grasses that lean with the wind, borders that change every month, trees planted for someone else to sit under. Beauty that keeps growing.
Read more about Hester★★★★★From clients of the studio
“I could read the plan. That sounds small, but two other designers had given us something that looked like wiring. Hester's was a drawing of a garden we recognised before it existed.”Anna Fielding, Southwold
“Our garden faces the North Sea. Everything we had planted before died in the first winter. Three years on, hers is still standing and mostly self-seeding.”Tom and Rachel Prior, Dune House
“The visits in the first year were the thing. She came back in June and moved half a border. It was right, and she had said she would.”Iain Mackie, Blythburgh
Book a consultation
Tell me as much as you can about the space, what you hope to see and feel in it, the timeline and a budget range, and a few times that would suit a video call or a visit.