A second career, and a much better one.

My name is Jen Donnelly, and I design gardens from home in Chalfont St Peter. Before this I spent more than twenty years in strategy, consulting and customer insight, with a long stretch of work on diversity and mental health along the way. It was a good career. It was not this one.

I retrained properly rather than drifting into it, taking the diploma at the London College of Garden Design and graduating with Distinction. What I brought with me from the first career turns out to matter more than I expected: listening to what someone actually needs rather than what they first ask for, structuring a project so nobody is surprised by a cost, and writing things down clearly enough that everyone is building the same garden.

The practice is just me. That is a deliberate choice, not a stage on the way to something bigger. The person who walks your garden at the consultation is the person drawing the layout, choosing every plant on the planting plan, reading the contractors' quotes with you and standing on site when it goes in. No handovers, no juniors, nothing lost in translation.

What I care about is whether a garden gets used. Gardens that look immaculate and sit empty are a failure of design, not of the owner. So I start from how you want to spend time out there — eating, talking, sitting quietly, watching children or watching bees — and design backwards from that. I call it designing social spaces, and it is the thread through everything, from a suburban back garden to a hospital courtyard.