Behind every great British garden… gardeners at work ...

From a milliner inspired by topiary to a model-turned-ecological gardener and a couple who swapped jobs in telecommunications for growing vegetables, Sir David Beckham’s rural heroes tell Julie Harding why craft and the countryside are key

It was while filming an episode of Lewis in an Oxford college garden that Tom Simpson fell in love – and within moments decided to abandon his peripatetic life in film and retrain as a garden designer

The garden was a blank canvas when I first moved in. A single tree. A lawn invaded by alkanet. London clay so hard you couldn’t push a spade in. I was more concerned with urgent matters such as the de

The head gardener at London’s Barbican Conservatory on its ongoing renovation – and why you shouldn’t give up on houseplants I grew up in Poland where my grandma used to take me to her allotment and I

Orderly hedges and classic features contrast with unruly wildlife-friendly planting in this rural Hertfordshire garden