Horticulture

Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace is a museum garden, open all year round. It features a wildflower meadow, sunken garden, orangery, topiary, ponds, lawns, hedging and borders designed by Todd Longstaffe Gowan and Pip Morrison. I was appointed Seasonal Gardener in Summer 2024. My contract was extended twice, so I also worked Autumn and Winter until March 2025.

It was a brilliant learning environment. I was taught classic skills including topiary, rotary mowing, turf laying, vertidrain and general lawn management techniques. I was responsible for the health of the shrub roses and orangery plants, diagnosing and proposing integrated plant health and pest management plans. A final highlight was using trigonometry and triangulation to map out a new formal parterre scheme.

Overall, I enjoyed maintaining a public historic garden. As I worked, I observed the site’s layers of history, such as the Tilia platyphylos trees that were coppiced and trained vertically into an arched walkway. Each limb was between 1-15 years old, but the base was over 100, carrying the pruning marks of several generations of gardeners, including mine. Time spliced. This interest resulted in me leading garden history tours for the palace’s museum staff in connection with their next exhibition.