Hello, I’m Harriet Rycroft, I’ve always been happiest in gardens so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I ended up being a professional gardener. After university I worked in the world of interior design, and then for some small magazines, but my heart was never really in office work. After my two sons were born I studied horticulture while they were at nursery school and volunteered at Hidcote Manor Gardens. Then when they went to school I went to work in the garden at Whichford Pottery and stayed there for nearly fourteen years, in sole charge for the last 10 or 11 of those years, planning, planting and maintaining large displays of planted pots all year round and providing text and photographs for two Whichford Pottery books. I reckon I must have planted about 7000 pots during that time…

Now that my boys have left home I am branching out a little – I still work part-time as a gardener, at the moment I’m helping at The Cotswold Wildlife Park  (see my first blogpost about this), which is great fun. I’m also writing and blogging, looking after my own garden (including several hundred pots…), visiting and photographing gardens and gardeners and learning more about this wonderful, infinitely interesting world of horticulture.

I teach container gardening at LearningWithExperts.com and thoroughly enjoy helping people from many parts of the world to make the most of their container collection. I also give demonstrations and talks about container gardening to clubs and societies – so if you’d like to ask about a topic for your WI group or Horticultural Society please contact me at harrietrycroft@btinternet.com to talk about availability, topics and prices.

This is my personal blog, if I talk about any products or services please be assured that I will be giving my honest opinion and I will tell you if anything I am discussing has been given to me by the manufacturer or promoter.

I will write a lot about plants and gardening, obviously, but I’m also fascinated by natural history and as time goes by I hope to share sights and experiences, from the Cotswolds where I live, from other parts of Britain, and from my occasional trips further afield. I hope you find it interesting!

All the best,

Harriet