Hi, I’m Rosie and I’m passionate about my garden, plants generally and about garden design/creation.

I am less passionate about this photo of me but my brother Henry, who has built this site, thinks it is fun, so I am going with him. My hair seldom looks that “coiffured” but I had just returned from the hairdresser when I was cutting irises in the pond and dropped my very expensive Felco No 2 secateurs into the depths. I tried everything – my long arm waterproof pond gloves and the pond net but it’s very deep. I knew I needed to take more serious action. I bought the waders from Amazon and they arrived the next day, when I retrieved the secateurs and this is the resulting photo.

I have considered myself a trainee gardener/ gardener since 2000 when, on returning from working and living for five years in Mumbai, India, I bought my first house with a garden, in London. The garden was very small (7 x 7 metres), but I wanted to make it lovely.

I threw myself into plant books, notably the A-Z Encyclopaedia of Plants and marked up all those I wanted to grow, based on the pictures, only to discover they were all tropical or tender. Shocked into reality about what I discovered I “shouldn’t” try to grow, I re-read the entire book marking those with at least two to four frost stars – and started studying in more depth - and planting.

As a result, almost my entire vocabulary of plants started in Latin, a subject I studied with mixed results up to O’Level (Grade B). And because I never listened enough to my parents as we walked through the countryside all over England in my childhood, I am still pretty bad at the common English names of many plants and trees. But I am working on it.

My mother is a fantastic gardener, plant grower and flower arranger and I still bow to her superior knowledge, ring her all the time for advice and visit the major shows (Malvern, Hampton Court) with her. She also has a much larger garden to work in, in the wonderful Worcestershire soil, which I am very jealous of. My father, apart from having been a fiendish wielder of the chain saw and thus severe pruner, has become a vegetable gardener in his later life and we still compare notes regularly on tomatoes and similar.

I am the eldest of five – with four younger brothers. I now have almost countless nieces and nephews and even more godchildren.

I have an MA in Geography from St. Hugh’s College, Oxford and, while there, I also worked for BBC Pebble Mill as a researcher and producer of docs and features for Radio 4. After University I came to work in London, in advertising, graphic design, financial PR and, since returning from India, corporate video online. So I am quite video online “techie” too now and am doing my own filming and editing of the videos in the blogs.

My life is now filled with my family, Pickle and Lottie (my two small dogs), and my friends, work, gardening, cooking, opera, theatre, movies, travel, The Times’ crossword daily - and now this site and blog.

I hope you enjoy my musings on the garden and that you will contribute with your comments, questions and observations.