Gardens Illustrated, July 2025

Featured in Gardens Illustrated and recognised with a prestigious Society of Garden Designers (SGD) Award, The Plough in Shiplake is our largest commercial project to date – a substantial hospitality garden created to help transform a much-loved village pub into a thriving community destination.

From car park to garden

The design brief was to transform the pub’s former car park into a substantial new garden that could work beautifully as a busy hospitality space, while feeling completely connected to its rural setting near Henley-on-Thames. The feature in Gardens Illustrated explores both the design thinking behind the garden and the planting choices that have helped it become such a distinctive part of The Plough.

Designing for hospitality

The garden was designed around the experience of arriving, eating, drinking and spending time outdoors, with planting playing a central role in defining the different spaces. Free-form island beds, locally quarried self-binding gravel, semi-mature multi-stemmed trees and loosely clipped native hedging create structure and movement without making the garden feel formal or divided.

Planting that defines the spaces

The planting moves from woodland-edge species around the quieter parts of the garden into a more open, prairie-inspired palette, with grasses and perennials providing movement, texture and translucency. The result is abundant and naturalistic, but also robust enough to withstand the demands of a busy pub garden and private events.

I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to create a garden on this scale where landscape, planting and hospitality all had to work together. Rather than using walls or conventional screening, planted islands, multi-stemmed trees, grasses and hedging create a series of more intimate dining areas within the larger space, while retaining views through the garden and out towards the surrounding countryside.

A garden that earns its keep

It is a good example of our approach to commercial and hospitality garden design: creating beautiful, characterful outdoor spaces that are rooted in their setting, rich in planting and wildlife, and practical enough to work hard for the people who use them.

With words by Kate Jacobs, photographs by Alister Thorpe and tips from yours truly on creating seclusion without the use of walls or screens. You can see the full project here