Influential Designers: Sarah Price

Sarah Price has rapidly established herself as one of the most prominent garden designers in Britain. Drawing on a prior training in fine art and a life-long love of wild and natural environments, her gardens have an immersive quality and are often described as ‘painterly’. She believes that the best gardens are beautiful places that elevate the senses and inspire deeper connections with the natural world. Sarah’s work begins with a sensitivity to the specificities of location: climate and ecology, history and culture, of both the site and its wider surroundings. She likes to keep hard landscaping to a minimum and instead uses plant forms for the underlying structure that is essential to the garden’s atmosphere.

She describes her work as ‘gardening in the round’: rather than offering pre-formulated, static views, gardens should invite active engagement and exploration. Sarah’s gardens reveal their true character in fleeting moments of infinite variation, brought about by changes of light and season. The ethereal beauty of her planting can invoke powerful emotional responses, akin to experiencing the most sensual of natural landscapes.

Sarah is the co-designer of the 2012 Gardens at the Olympic Park in east London and remains at the core of the team planning the post-Games legacy design and maintenance of the gardens. Among other current projects are landscape designs for The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and consultancy for a six acre Elizabethan garden in the Cotswolds and for the grounds of a countryside palazzo in Umbria.