We are committed to supporting our graduates through their careers and many will return to update their skills on our graduate training days. Our reputation in design training also means that we offer career opportunities exclusively to our graduates. These have included designing gardens for international garden shows, and for permanent landscapes such as a park on the South Bank in central London and therapeutic gardens for schools and hospitals. Most recently a partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society has given graduates the opportunity to design borders at the RHS Hampton Court Garden Festival.
All our students and graduates can have a page on our website to promote their projects, skills and services. We find that many people are interested in appointing a new designer to their projects and so these pages are an invaluable support to an early career in garden design.
Adam Phoenix | image – Sophie Mitchell
Kate Brown | Image – Sophie Mitchell
As in many professions award programmes are an important springboard to success. Graduates will often enter their course work for awards and since their inception our graduates have won awards every year in the annual Student Awards from the Society of Garden + Landscape Designers, the UK’s professional body for Garden Design. Graduates have also been named RHS Young Designer of the Year and RHS Career Changer of The Year, and have won the premier student award in the USA; achieved success with the British Association of Landscape Industries and the Association of Professional Landscapers design awards and at garden shows including the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Singapore Garden Show and the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
Many of our graduates are well-known garden design professionals such as Tom Massey, Harry Holding, Emily Erlam and Alexa Ryan Mills. We often celebrate their success by asking them to return to inspire our current students.
Harry Holding
Tom Massey
To achieve success, you don’t have to win awards. As well as delivering up to date design skills such as CAD and introducing the use of AI within design offices we firmly believe that knowledge of construction techniques and sound professional practice are just as important and whichever course you choose, we aim to cover these skills as well as the design skills you would expect from a leading garden design diploma.
The film below showcases Alexa Ryan-Mills, a Planting Design Diploma Graduate talking about her garden career after qualifying with us.