Featured Gardener: Laura Woolley

by | June 8th, 2026 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

Smiling blonde woman holding a colourful bouquet of fresh dahlia flowers in a garden.

When Laura from @lauras_little_cottage_garden moved into a new-build with a blank canvas garden, she had no idea that a whole new chapter was about to begin! As well as a new home and a new baby, Laura decided to study for an RHS Level 2 qualification and became a career-change gardener. The proud owner of a thriving cottage garden and busy allotment, find out what she’s trying for the first time this year…

How did you get into gardening?

Split view of a sunny back garden with a bench and blooming pink rose bushes.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

I’m a career change gardener, creating a cottage garden aesthetic in my small (fairly) new-build plot in Milton Keynes. I also have an allotment plot which I use to grow cut flowers for arranging at home, alongside a little bit of fruit and veg.

Our small garden (11m x 9m) was a blank canvas when we moved in, and during maternity leave with my first son I really got stuck into trying to transform the space. I started growing a few things from seed and from there I became totally hooked!

After being made redundant during the national lockdown, I decided it might be a good opportunity to retrain. I attended Shuttleworth College one day a week to study my RHS Level 2 qualification. Following that I became a member of the WFGA, and completed my WRAGs certificate at Kingsbridge Farm. I’ve now been trading as a self-employed gardener for 3 years and I absolutely love it!

What inspires you in the garden?

Split view of a patio with tall potted foxgloves and a stone birdbath surrounded by purple flowers.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

I’m passionate about providing for pollinators and creating a safe habitat for local wildlife. If the garden is filled with bees, butterflies and birds, it makes the space feel full of life and is much more enjoyable! We currently have a family of great tits in our nest box and it’s so lovely to watch them nest building whilst we sit and eat our breakfast.

I’m completely hooked on growing from seed! I find so much joy in nurturing life and witnessing the transformation of a seed into a flower or vegetable. You can also grow some exceptionally beautiful varieties that you just can’t find in the garden centres.

I also love the challenge of gardening each of the different areas. I have a deep shade area that I enjoy trying to make as interesting and flower-filled as possible. In stark contrast, I also have container areas that are in full sun and tricky to get right! I love being forced to come up with new ideas about what might work best in these different situations.

What do you like to grow?

Split view of a spring garden border with white daffodils, hellebores, and a young magnolia tree.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

I use the garden as an opportunity to surround myself with my favourite colours and scents. I have a colour palette of pink, peach, purple, and white; roses are my favourite because of their delicious scent. I think fragrance is so important to the senses, so to sit in the garden surrounded by beauty and scent is the best feeling!

I also love to grow cut flowers because locally and organically grown blooms are better for the environment. I find a lot of joy in cutting and arranging flowers; it’s such a mindful act, and it brings me a moment of calm in a busy world!

What’s your favourite gardening style?

Split view of a stone patio with light blue bistro furniture and vibrant container flowers in a back garden.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

Cottage gardens are my absolute favourite – I love the abundance of pollinator-friendly plants packed into a small space, making it feel even more intimate. They’re also more informal, and I love that wild look when everything’s in full swing (usually in late summer).

This style suits me because packed borders means I never need to weed and that’s a huge bonus! I absolutely love cottage garden plants such as Roses, Foxgloves, Aquilegia, Alliums & Hardy Geraniums to name just a few! I also really like that cottage gardens allow you to incorporate upcycled or vintage pieces as planters, adding character to new-build plots.

I embrace the self-seeders in my garden, saving me the time and energy of growing from seed and planting out. These are stronger, more vigorous plants better suited to my growing conditions, and I’m here for it!

What are you most proud of?

Split view of a smiling blonde woman holding a large dahlia bouquet and a display of potted pink tulips.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

I think I’d have to say that I’m most proud of my spring bulb display and my hellebore collection. Hellebores are a huge passion of mine. I absolutely love that they give you that floral hit in the depths of winter, just when you need it most. They come in such a variety of different shapes and colours – the frilly doubles are my favourite! Every time I see a variety I don’t have I end up buying it and, for that reason, I’ve got a large number of them in my garden.

Spring is my favourite season so I like to welcome it with a bang! I like to have lots of spring bulbs right by my back door where I can admire them. I really enjoy planning my spring bulb display every year and find it so rewarding when they come into bloom. I like to include early and late flowering varieties in my bulb displays so that I can extend the season for as long as possible. I cram as many bulbs into the container as possible, without them touching, so that my displays have the biggest impact. My favourite varieties are the late double tulips, which look like peonies. In fact, I have a thing for all double flowers; they’re so beautiful!

What are your future plans?

Split view of a back garden with blooming sunflowers on the left and a wooden obelisk trellis surrounded by purple flowers on the right.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

I haven’t got any immediate future plans for the garden, but I’m trying a few new things at the allotment this year. I’m finally making sense of my extra large beds by dividing them up with some simple brick paths. This means that I won’t be compacting the soil by walking across it anymore, and the smaller spaces will be used to grow different crops or flowers in each season.

I’m also trying some darker coloured dahlias this year! Usually, I like to stick to my pastel shades, but I think the darker shades will bring something extra to my autumn arrangements. I’m excited to watch them grow and work them into my mantle vase.

What’s your top gardening tip for beginners?

Split view of a tiered display of potted tulips and daffodils next to a blonde woman holding seedling trays inside a greenhouse.

Images courtesy of Laura Woolley

My top gardening tip for beginners would be to invest in your soil! Improving soil health is the best thing you can do for your garden. I make sure I mulch all my beds and borders once a year and it makes such a difference! The thick layer of organic matter gets dragged down into the soil by the worms over time, improving the soil structure. Plants grown in healthy soil are stronger and better able to fight off pests & disease. Mulching also helps the soil to retain moisture, something that’s becoming more and more vital during these increasing periods of drought.

I would also encourage anyone starting out to grow the plants they love. Your garden should make you happy, so focus on your favourite colours, textures, flowers, shrubs, trees etc & build a garden that fills you with joy!

Grow like Laura

Close-up of a vibrant orange dahlia flower with bright pink tipped petals.

Image: Dahlia ‘Orange Turmoil’ from Thompson & Morgan

If you’d like to grow the plants and flowers Laura showcases on her Instagram page, here are some of her favourites:

Follow Laura at @lauras_little_cottage_garden to see her garden grow and change through the seasons. For more inspiration, our full series of Featured Gardeners contains a wealth of hugely knowledgeable growers who are also worth a follow.

Featured Gardener: Chloe Plumstead

by | April 13th, 2026 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

A woman with vibrant red hair standing in a lush summer garden filled with blooming pink dahlias and purple cosmos flowers against a rustic wooden fence.

Image courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

When @chloeplumstead was little, she loved pottering in the garden with her nan and watching her mum turn a plain council estate plot into a buzzing mix of flowers, fruit, and vegetables. Now in her thirties, she co-runs a gardening brand for women and tends her own garden and allotment that are overflowing with colour and abundance. Read on to find out how she turned a childhood love of gardening into a life full of blooms, experiments, and joyful chaos…

How did you get into gardening?

A smiling woman wearing a grey bucket hat holding a wicker basket of fresh allotment vegetables.

Image courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

It’s difficult to say when I first fell in love with gardening because I inherited the gene down the maternal line. From a very young age, I was pottering around in the garden with my nan, watering plants with my tiny watering can as she dibbed, dug and deadheaded. Then when my mum, brother and I moved into a new home, my mum completely transformed the council estate garden from an overgrown rectangle into a buzzing medley of flowers, fruits & veggies – she even added fish into the ponds that she dug herself. I’ve been surrounded by women doing wonderful things with nature from the get-go.

I started experimenting myself in my mid-twenties. I was living in a rental at the time with a tiny concrete garden but I began to see what I could do with the space, growing potatoes and tomatoes in pots, planting my first bulbs and so on. Fast forward to my thirties, and I now co-run a gardening brand for women. I have a little garden of my own and a half allotment plot which I took over last year. I still refer to myself as a novice because I feel like I’m always learning, but growing and gardening have really become the centre of my life.

What’s your favourite gardening style?

A close-up collage showcasing three distinct pink dahlia flower varieties in full bloom.

Images courtesy of a Chloe Plumstead

It’s not a gardening style per-se, but I have to confess that I’m not hugely interested in large estate gardens. Give me a regular, domestic garden any day, catered to and maintained by the same person over years and years, simply because they love it. I feel the everyday gardener is often unsung in favour of big budget gardens, but it’s in our own spaces in the evenings and weekends that magic really happens.

So I like a bit of mess, a bit of disorder, nothing meticulously planned. If I had to describe my own style, perhaps modern cottage? I love bright, hot pinks and abundance – plants crammed in and spilling out of borders.

What inspires you in the garden?

A side-by-side collage featuring a hand-held bouquet of deep pink dahlias and a close-up of light pink cosmos flowers growing in a garden.

Images courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

I’m inspired by the sheer variety of what it’s possible to grow. It’s a smorgasbord, a veritable chocolate box of options, and I feel a renewed sense of excitement every year that I get to try something new.

It’s impossible to be bored in the garden! There’s always something to do and so many ways to do it. I love that I can say to myself ‘okay, I’ll grow some squash this year’, and then spend three days deep-diving into all of the different varieties, their pros & cons and risks & rewards. The same goes for dahlias – every year I try new cultivars, holding onto the ones I’ve tried, tested and loved while building up my library of favourites.

What are you most proud of?

A side-by-side collage showing a woman posing with spring daffodils and pansies in a greenhouse, alongside a shot of her holding small vases of orange and yellow dahlias indoors.

Images courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

I’m most proud of my large fatsia. It’s been grown from a cutting taken from my nan’s garden years and years ago, and it’s now nearly 6ft tall. It’s the first thing I see from my back door when I look out into the garden and it makes me think of my nan every time.

What are your future plans?

A collage showcasing three varieties of yellow garden flowers, including dahlias and nasturtiums in bloom.

Images courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

This year I experimented with edimental planting – interweaving edible and ornamental plants to grow food alongside flowers – but next year, I’m going back to growing predominantly blooms in my garden, keeping the food for the allotment. I realised that I missed looking out upon a sea of dahlias and, with the plot, I have more than enough space to grow food, anyway.

I’ve just dug up my sunny border to start afresh with planting. I covered my tiny lawn in spring and rushed ahead with growing, but the plant placement and spacing was all messed up so I’ve gone back to the drawing board, starting with improving the soil with lots of homemade compost.

Other than that, I hope to grow more of what I like to eat. I’m a bit of a magpie; I tend to get drawn in by new and interesting things, and then end up with a tiny harvest or lots of what I don’t really like (Swiss chard being a prime example!)

What’s your top gardening tip for beginners?

A woman wearing gardening gloves kneeling in a spring patio garden, holding a terracotta pot with small plants, surrounded by purple tulips in larger containers.

Image courtesy of Chloe Plumstead

My top tip? Listen, watch, read, yes, but then get out there and make mistakes for yourself. It’s the only way you’ll really learn, and you should be mucking up! Gardening and growing requires you to set perfection aside and embrace patience. And remember, you have a responsibility to these outside spaces. We are only custodians – the outdoors can never truly belong to us – so if you’ve moved into a new home and you don’t expect to be there for a long time, please don’t concrete the whole space over and shove one potted tree in the corner. Remember there will be gardeners after you, and gardeners after them, and so on. Respect your outdoor spaces and they will reward you endlessly.

Grow like Chloe

A close-up of a large Café au Lait dahlia flower in full bloom, featuring creamy peach and pale pink petals surrounded by green leaves in a sunny garden.

Image: Dahlia ‘Cafe Au Lait’ from Thompson & Morgan

If you’d like to grow the plants and flowers Chloe showcases on her Instagram page, here are some of her favourites:

Follow Chloe at @chloeplumstead to see how she continues to grow, inspire, and make the most of every inch of her garden. For more inspiration, our full series of Featured Gardeners contains a wealth of hugely knowledgeable growers who are also worth a follow.

Featured Gardener: Sally Grace

by | March 9th, 2026 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

A woman smiling in a container garden next to purple wallflowers and a tiered water fountain.

Image courtesy of Sally Grace

Sally from @sally_grace_gardening’s love of nature began in childhood, collecting leaves and flowers in a scrapbook. Fast forward to today, and both her garden and allotment are full of fruit, flowers and unusual homegrown treats. Discover how she uses smart planting tricks to get the most from every corner…

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Featured Gardener: Jane Lord

by | February 9th, 2026 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

A woman smiling outdoors while holding a large white dahlia flower with a garden and blue sky in the background.

Image courtesy of Jane Lord

When Jane from @the_little_end_cottage moved into her home fifteen years ago, she fulfilled her long-held dream of a pretty, flower-filled garden. Over the years, she and her husband have completely transformed the space by adding stone patios, wildflower lawns, cut flower beds and a stunning pergola-framed outdoor dining area. To learn more about Jane, including which flower she couldn’t be without, read on…

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Featured Gardener: Sharon Lewis

by | January 12th, 2026 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

A woman in a blue-and-white striped shirt and jeans kneeling in a garden, smiling beside a small black curly-haired dog with purple allium flowers in the foreground.

Image courtesy of Sharon Lewis

When Sharon (@lifeoutsideforme) moved into her Worcestershire home in 2011, gardening quickly became a source of calm and creativity. Over the years, and alongside work and family commitments, she’s shaped her outside space to reflect a love of nature, wildlife, and the changing seasons. Discover how she brings her garden to life through seasonal planting, wildlife-friendly choices, and a relaxed cottage-style approach… 

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Featured Gardener: Luke Newnes

by | December 8th, 2025 | Featured Gardener, Gardening Posts

A smiling, bald man with a beard kneeling in a garden, gesturing with open hands towards a bed of purple and pink flowers.

Image courtesy of Luke Newnes

When Luke from @man_about_gardening moved into a new-build home in Shropshire, the garden was just a blank canvas. With curiosity and a lot of trial and error, he and his wife have transformed it into a cottage-style haven full of roses, dahlias, foxgloves and pollinator-friendly plants. From the central fountain to the vibrant companion planting, every corner bursts with life, colour and family memories. Discover how gardening became his passion and his top tip for making a small garden feel much bigger… 

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