Meet the designers of the Flood Re: The Flood Resilient Garden in the Sanctuary category at RHS Chelsea 2024
Naomi Slade
Naomi Slade is a journalist, author, designer and consultant garden expert. Over a 25-year career she has worked extensively within the gardening and lifestyle media as a writer and broadcaster and in 2022 won the Garden Media Guild Practical Journalist of the Year Award.
With a long-running column in Garden News magazine, she also regularly contributes to national magazines and newspapers, including Gardens Illustrated, RHS The Garden and The Telegraph. She is a frequent radio guest and has presented segments on BBC Gardeners’ World and ITV Wales Coast and Country.
Having studied biology and ecology, she often incorporates themes of sustainability and conservation in her garden designs and she also enjoys the challenge of a conceptual garden. Her punk-themed, ‘Never Mind the Hollyhocks’ won Gold and Best in Show at the National Gardening Show, and she staged a well-received feature garden, based on the Wisley Winter Walk, at the RHS Early Spring Show in 2018.
As well as visiting gardens across the UK and Europe, Naomi has a strong interest in plants in their natural environments, and enjoys botanising in wild landscapes. Her taste in plants is broad, and alongside a modest collection of snowdrops, she has an orchard of over 150 named variety apple trees, and a microenterprise that makes varietal apple juice.
To date, Naomi has written nine gardening books including best-selling Hydrangeas, part of a series of illustrated monographs published by Pavilion, and RHS The Winter Garden published by DK, which was released in September ’23. Further book releases are scheduled for 2024 and 2025.
www.naomislade.com
Twitter: @NaomiSlade
Instagram: @NaomiSladeGardening
See the Flood Re: The Flood Resilient Garden
Dr Ed Barsley
Ed Barsley is a designer, author, artist and entrepreneur. He is an expert in environmental design, with a particular interest in developing strategies to improve the resilience of communities and the built and natural environment.
His practice ‘The Environmental Design Studio’ (TEDS) is an award-winning social venture which won the Sunday Times ‘Resilient Home’ competition with their design of the ‘Home for All Seasons’. In January 2020, Ed’s book ‘Retrofitting for Flood Resilience: A Guide to Building & Community Design’ was published by the RIBA and showcases hundreds of strategies for resilience that span the catchment, community, street and building scale.
Ed is a fellow of the RSA and a member of DEFRA’s roundtable on flooding. He’s delivered keynotes at flood conferences and events worldwide and since 2018 has been running the RIBA’s core lecture series on flood resilient design and well as helping develop the UK’s national training on Property Flood Resilience.
Alongside running his practice, Ed has been involved with a number of Research Council-funded studies, including the PhD he has been working on at the University of Cambridge on flood-resilient architecture and the communication of risk. In 2020, Ed launched the ‘Hazard and Hope’ initiative, to inform and inspire adaptation and resilience to a changing climate. In 2022, he spoke on the Climate Stage at Glastonbury and later that summer launched the ‘Climate Creatives Challenge’, an international design competition supporting new and novel approaches to climate communication.
www.t-e-d-s.com
Twitter: @edbarsley
Instagram: @edbarsley
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