Meet the Designers
Phil Hirst & Joanne Charlton run their own design practices but are working together to create the Greenfingers Together Garden.
Phil Hirst leads a garden design practice based in Sheffield and has designed gardens of all sizes across Yorkshire, the North Midlands and further afield.
The RHS Wentworth Woodhouse Flower Show 2025 will be Phil’s third experience of exhibiting at an RHS show and the first time that he has done so in collaboration with another designer. Phil’s show garden debut was at the 2013 RHS Tatton Park Flower Show where he scooped a gold medal and ‘Best Large Garden’ award for the garden that he designed for Sanctuary Group. The garden wowed both judges and visitors with its exciting use of stainless steel structures. This garden celebrated the centenary of the invention of stainless steel in Sheffield. In 2018 Phil designed a garden for the RHS Chatsworth Flower show which was awarded a gold medal and ‘Best Show Garden’. This garden was also grounded in the local area, celebrating the natural landscape of the northern Peak District.
Phil has lived in Sheffield for 40 years and is excited to be creating a show garden close to home. Working in collaboration with Barnsley based fellow garden designer, Joanne Charlton has added an extra local dimension to the project.
Phil says: “I was lucky to be asked by Greenfingers Charity to design a garden for the Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice. Greenfingers does amazing work all over the UK in funding the creation of gardens for children’s hospices. Often these gardens are focussed on the children who are supported by the hospice, but in this project the emphasis is different. This garden is about parents and how they can be supported and find comfort in an outdoor space at an unimaginably difficult time. It is a real privilege to feel that in some small way our work may help somebody to get through the darkest of days. Working with Joanne has been a great opportunity to explore and exchange ideas and share the challenges that designing a garden of this nature brings. Despite the solemn nature of the garden’s purpose, it has been a hugely rewarding and enjoyable experience to work together to bring the garden to fruition.”
Phil has been designing gardens for over 18 years but spent many years prior to this working as an accountant for the University of Sheffield. Phil is a fully registered member of the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers.
Away from gardens, Phil is a keen musician, singing with the Sheffield Oratorio Chorus and playing the cello in an amateur orchestra. Phil is also the Tower Captain of a local church bell ringing team.
https://www.philhirstgardens.co.uk/
Joanne arrived at garden design from an arts background following a career in 3D design and silversmithing. Her design journey craved a larger three dimensional spatial canvas with her artistic side relishing painting with plants, texture and colour. At the heart of her designs are her wonderful supportive clients many of whom she has collaborated with on multiple projects over years. She is proud to be a pre registered member of SGLD and can’t wait to become a fully registered member in the near future!
The daughter of a Barnsley mining engineer she has had the privilege of living in the beautiful South Yorkshire Pennines all her life with its mellow hills, moorland heather plateaus, wooded valleys with peat tinted streams, which is a constant inspiration for Joanne. Woven into this is her fascination with human’s intervention within the landscape, dry stone walls cutting across fields, stone squeeze styles framing flowered meadows beyond, still, deep reservoirs with buttressed dam walls, even uneven well trodden fern fringed footpaths through woodland. She says most of her designing happens mentally while walking her glow of Golden Retrievers in these wonderful places.
2025 marks ten years working as a garden designer. It therefore seems fitting to be presenting The Greenfingers Charity Together Garden at RHS Wentworth Woodhouse, in collaboration with fellow South Yorkshire garden designer Phil Hirst MSGLD. The garden has been designed for a site at Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice (which is local to Wentworth Woodhouse and serves the South Yorkshire area) and generously funded by the Greenfingers Charity. It has been a privilege for Joanne and Phil to design this garden, a personal journey, exploring how a garden space can hold us in its embrace in the darkest times, for just a moment offering solace.
Joanne and Phil enjoy the creative challenge of collaborating together. It’s an opportunity for Joanne to think differently and explore design thoughts in a philosophically alternative way. Their designs are plant drenched, allowing their natural forms to take centre stage and shine. Both designers continue to have their own individual design studios and client base.
When thinking of her interests outside garden design, Joanne has to smile to herself. She enjoys the simplicity of gardening in her own plot, her favourite task being mulching in late winter. Decadence is reading a book and relaxing in her own garden surrounded by scented flowers, managing to reading a few pages before noticing a weed… then the gardening starts again.