About us
A place to learn, to share, and to experience knowledge, skills, and ideas in gardening and garden and landscape design.
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- Founders
- Tutors
- Venues
- Our history
Garden Masterclass aims to bring together gardeners and designers with the very best and most innovative people in the gardening world through one day workshops (mostly in Britain) and webinars. Each workshop or webinar is organised around a specific topic, and designed to help participants learn, create and apply new knowledge and skills.
Founders
Annie Guilfoyle
Annie is an award-winning garden designer and director of Creative Landscapes. She was the founder and the Director of Garden Design at KLC School of Design for eighteen years, is the Garden Course Consultant at West Dean College in West Sussex and teaches a design course at Great Dixter. Annie teaches, writes, lectures and judges internationally and is passionate about education in horticulture and design. Annie’s work includes being an RHS judge at Chelsea Flower Show.
Noel Kingsbury
Noel is a well-known writer on gardening and plant science. Renowned for his ability to explain complex concepts, he has earned a global reputation as an innovative teacher in gardening and planting design and has run workshops in some dozen countries. He is the author of some thirty books, including the ground-breaking New Perennial Garden, and several collaborations with Dutch designer Piet Oudolf.
He is also the creator of Perennial Directory. Noel lives in central Portugal where he has an experimental minimal-irrigation garden.
Our history
Back in 2014, Annie and Noel were asked by Gardens Illustrated Magazine to curate two Garden Festivals, one-day events which featured a range of presentations by garden experts. This gave Annie and Noel the idea to run similar events but spread them up, down and across the British Isles. Many of the venues are selected because they are private gardens and places that are normally hard to access.
Starting in 2017 with live events, the covid lockdown year, 2020, saw Annie and Noel embrace the online world and go global with a series of public service broadcasts, now formalised as our weekly ‘Thursday Garden Chat’ (with recordings going directly to YouTube). Webinars and online courses soon followed, with the Naturalistic Planting Design course, in collaboration with Prof. Nigel Dunnett of Sheffield University, being a particular success. The latest addition to Garden Masterclass is our podcast channel on Substack.