Meet the designer of The Ripple Effect Raingarden Garden Resilient Planting Pocket at RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024
Sarah Cotterill
Dr Sarah Cotterill is the founder and lead designer at Wild Atlantic Gardens. She founded the business as a creative outlet and means to pursue her love of plants and design.
See The Ripple Effect Raingarden
Sarah’s full-time role is as an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering at University College Dublin, where she has over twelve years’ experience working on sustainable water management in the UK, USA and Ireland.
Prior to her PhD in civil engineering, Sarah completed an Honours degree in Biology which introduced her to plant physiology, classification, plant nutrition, as well as identification skills for trees, flowering plants and ferns, and strategies for managing different ecosystems. When she was a child, her father would take her out into nature and teach her basic plant identification skills, instilling a passion for plants at a young age.
Recently, Sarah has begun a diploma in garden design, integrating her expertise in sustainable water management, her knowledge of plants, and her love of drawing and design. She has designed and constructed schemes for private gardens and commercial projects of varying sizes.
Sarah says: “The resilient pocket planting category is an excellent opportunity to bring together my interests in climate change, stormwater management, planting, art and design. The opportunity to create a pocket garden for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival is phenomenal, both in terms of the potential learning, through the act of making the garden itself and through the mentorship, and in the exposure gained from exhibiting at a show that typically receives 120,000 visitors. One of the main reasons I applied was to be mentored by Tom Massey, who is someone I think has been ahead of the curve in creating sustainable and resilient landscapes within homeowners’ gardens. I love that this pocket garden category is accessible, in terms of size and scale for new and aspiring designers, and that it focuses almost exclusively on planting, showing Festival visitors how they can not only create functional, but aesthetically beautiful, resilient spaces no matter the size of their own garden.”
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