hello@hannahcrawleystudio.com
https://hannahcrawleystudio.com
Hannah Crawley Studio
07834164869
Graduation year: 2025/26 PDD
Hannah Crawley
Hannah is a planting designer aiming to reconnect clients with the natural world through their gardens. She seeks to maximise diversity of plants in outside spaces, creating joyful, intensive schemes full of warmth and life. As well as providing beauty and texture, every plant selected will have a beneficial impact on wildlife – whether as food, passage, shelter, nest or habitat. She believes that each garden has a story to tell, and she seeks to reveal that story through planting schemes which speak to the local surroundings and to the client.
Biography:
The daughter of two passionate home gardeners, Hannah was initially a reluctant recruit to horticulture but nonetheless was always surrounded by plants and spent a lot of time in the natural world. Her real love of plants and gardens began in her early twenties, when she first had a tiny garden to care for out the back of a basement flat in London. She spent many years working in marketing and communications for charities, and always came back to gardening and plants as a therapeutic hobby at the end of the working day.
After having her two children, the opportunity to take a different path came along and she enrolled on the RHS Level 2 course. This confirmed that her hobby could become a career. Following this, she completed the Planting Design Diploma at LCGD – and hasn’t looked back. Her communications career was often centered on storytelling, and she approaches her planting design work in the same way – using plants to tell the story of each unique outside space she works on.
Instagram: @hannahcrawleystudio
This project in SE London primarily aimed to take the busy owners out of their stressful lives into a completely different place both emotionally and physically. The garden aims to help the clients feel present in nature, whilst also miles away from their everyday reality. The soft, full planting and muted colour palette is inspired by Monet’s 1900 painting at Giverny, ‘The Artist’s Garden’, mimicking brush strokes and invoking a feeling of envelopment and comfort.
Each area of the garden takes them deeper in a sense of relaxation, moving from a fresh, palette cleanser of zingy limes and pale pinks through to a dedicated area to pause and connect with nature. A path surrounded with woodland plants, under a canopy of Lonicera is inspired by forest bathing, whilst drifts of soft billowing grasses near the house make you feel like you are walking on clouds.
Based in East Sussex, this garden sought to reconnect a young family through their mutual love of nature and storytelling. Inspired by the Winnie-the-Pooh books, the garden was split in different character areas to serve the needs of each family member whilst also encouraging them to come together. ‘I just wanted to be sure of you’, a reference to the unbreakable bond between Pooh and Piglet, is a characterful potager area for the family to tend together, featuring apple cordons and a willow teepee. As it’s much easier to talk whilst walking rather than sitting facing one another, ‘An Enchanted Place’ was developed to recreate a woodland walk type atmosphere, featuring native trees and woodland planting.
An ode to nature, ‘Eeyore’s not-so-gloomy-place’ is a Nigel Dunnett-inpired naturalistic area, with native and non-native wildflowers and grasses cocooning log piles and ferns, aiming to attract the rare Red-Shanked Carder bee. The more traditional herbaceous planting area is ‘Daphne’s Garden’, especially developed for the dedicated gardener of the household and a place for her to indulge her love of full, joyful borders – with structure from Fagus orientalis ‘Iskander’ columns and the all-season interest of the Chionanthus retusus.
This North London garden was positively dripping in potential. Clearly previously owned by a passionate gardener, it had fantastic bones with lots of well chosen, mature plants – although many in need of attention. The new owners were seeking to rediscover what the garden could be, following two years of renovation work on the house. An unusual garden for London, it featured little hidden pathways providing additional opportunities for interesting planting and a variety of conditions allowing for a really interesting range of plants. The owners agreed that the character should be maintained and further defined, and were very happy to lean in to a relaxed, slightly wild look to create an unexpected haven in the city. A very special garden.
