Julian and Isabel Bannerman have worked together designing and making gardens and buildings since 1983. As well as trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants their gardens contain swimming pools, lakes, fountains, rills, cascades, follies, ruins, summer houses, romantic ruins, temples, rustic artifices and sculpture. They recently won a competition to design the British Memorial Garden to 9/11 in New York with a contemporary garden design and are past winners of an RHS Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medal, and have also won a Civic Trust Award and a Europa Nostra Award – both for their conversion of Waddesdon Dairy, Bucks…
…This year they have won three awards for ‘The Collector Earl’s Garden’ at Arundel Castle, opened by the Prince of Wales in May, and the garden at Houghton Hall in Norfolk with which they were closely involved was made Christies Garden of the Year 2008. Their whole endeavour is not only about a passion for plants and gardens, but also about built structures, water, woodland and the wider landscape, which may equally be an urban landscape. They have been very lucky in their clients, for whom they have strived to create places which really work and generate pleasure. Success in this comes as the result of collaboration and communication. Although they are both highly opinionated the process is not prescriptive, it is about the designers understanding the needs of the client, and the client the empirical knowledge of the designers.
