The search to find Britain’s very best private garden – The Gardeners’ Garden – has been won by Fran Wakefield who lives at Tidmarsh near Pangbourne in Berkshire.


Fran Wakefield

Her garden was one of more than 100 submitted in the inaugural search for The Gardeners’ Garden sponsored by the Gardencare lawnmower brand. The competition to win more than £1000 of Gardencare equipment is also supported by The National Garden Scheme and the Garden Media Guild.

With its formal box edged lawns, carefully sculpted box shapes and delightful borders and trees, all inside an ancient brick wall with Fran’s home, a former tithe barn, forming the fourth side of the rectangle.

Peter Chaloner, managing director of Henton and Chattell from Nottingham, owners of the Gardencare brand in the UK, said: “There are something like 17 million private gardens in the UK. The highest accolade for a professional garden designer is a gold medal at Chelsea but there is nothing similar for the huge army of private gardeners who toil away year after year.

“Our aim is to develop this award into something as prestigious at a Chelsea Gold and the judges and I have been stunned by the quality of the entries. We will be launching our 2014 competition at Easter and hope to attract hundreds of entries.”

Fran Wakefield garden and the winners of the silver and bronze medal certificates and prizes all happen to open their gardens for the NGS.

“I’ve never won anything like this in my life and am so thrilled that the judges liked it so much. It is an honour to be the inaugural winner of The Gardeners’ Garden,” said Fran.

Chairman of the judges, George Plumptre, the chief executive of the National Garden Scheme, believes the award “fills a much needed vacuum in British gardens”.

“There are,” he said, “quite literally hundreds of thousands of British private gardens that deserve some recognition. We all hope that Henton and Chattell’s initiative with The Gardeners’ Garden develops to become a major and nationally recognised award for amateur gardeners.”