Château de Miromesnil

I was commissioned to photograph a beautiful garden in Normandy, France back in 2018. After the shoot, I had some time left before catching the ferry back to England so I stopped at the Château de Miromesnil where I had a lovely walk around the gardens.

Birthplace of Maupassant, many visitors come here because of him. I didn’t know much about the place before I got there and I was so happy to discover the beautiful potager around the château. It is not your usual manicured French garden but it’s full of lovely fruit trees, colourful dahlias and zinnias, cabbages and very photogenic rows of dill. Absolutely heavenly. I would highly recommend to visit and join the guided tour as well (if you’re a French speaker) which is very informative and gives lots interesting details about the past of the château.

Garden by the sea

In recent years, one of the highlights of my trips up to Scotland is meeting Rachael of Hedgerow / @hedgerow for a coffee or lunch and a walk and chat around the streets of Portobello. She shows me the most beautiful little streets , colourful old doors and gates and we admire anything green and flowery (I must do a blog post just on that). When, after a long long time, we finally travelled up to Scotland again in May, I got to see Rachael’s beautiful garden too and her stylish home (proper magazine material but I didn’t want to be too pushy on that front, maybe next time)

Rachael is a floral designer and an architect and these passions of hers can be found everywhere you look in her garden and home.

We had tea and cinnamon buns and a good, much needed chat and I spent some time out to her rainy garden with my camera. We then headed out for lunch to Rachael’s favourite place - Skylark - before walking back home through rainy Portobello and making a flat lay with flowers from her garden.

Making this flat lay with flowers from Rachael’s garden was such a treat. I never take it for granted picking flowers (or dismantling a bouquet) just for this. The backdrop we used was her kitchen table and the light in the kitchen just worked perfectly and helped us create this moody image on that rainy day.

Thank you Rachael for this very special day, I had the best time. This must have been the most relaxing day of my holiday.

I’m going to share with you more private gardens, do come along.

International Photographer of the Year 2014 / Finalist

I have a fondness for flower seeds. And growing anything from seeds. It has always inspired me how from a tiny seed such beautiful and tasteful vegetables can grow.

When we moved to our current home, an unknown garden welcomed where I kept discovering whatever it had to offer. It did offer a lot of flowers and seeds and so was born my little project back then. Which later gifted me with a Finalist title in the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition in 2014. So here you have the images and some more of the book they ended up in. And me with my images at the Kew Gardens exhibition.