Garden designer Yorkshire — Sally Tierney

I've been designing private gardens across Yorkshire since 1997. In that time I've worked on properties from the centre of York to the edges of the Dales, from Harrogate's Victorian villas to new-build estates on the outskirts of Leeds. Every garden is different, but what they share is a connection to this landscape — its soils, its light, its weather, and its seasons.

Yorkshire isn't one landscape. The Vale of York has heavy clay that holds water through winter and bakes hard in summer. The Harrogate district sits on sandstone and gritstone — free-draining, slightly acidic, and kind to a wide range of ornamental planting. The Wolds are thin chalk and limestone. The Dales are a mosaic of acid peat and limestone pavement. And the A1 corridor from Wetherby south runs along a ridge of magnesian limestone — alkaline, free-draining, and often shallow over rock.

Understanding these differences isn't academic. It's the reason one garden thrives and another doesn't. I don't design from a catalogue. I design from the ground up — starting with what's actually there, and working with it rather than against it.

That's what twenty-five years in one region gives you. Not just experience, but knowledge you can't get from a textbook. I know which plants will cope with a north-facing slope in Knaresborough. I know what happens to clay soil in a wet York winter. And I know how to make a garden that looks after itself, because I've watched hundreds of them grow.