Roger Webster Garden Design

13/01/2026

My website is back online after a technical issue has been resolved

Garden Designer covering Exeter and Devon. A thoughtful design service to help you make the most of your outdoor space.

31/12/2025

Planting tulips in large containers; looking forward to a bright start in 2026

01/12/2025

Winter sunshine, glowing berries, dried grasses and scented flowering camellia hedge ensure this garden entrance stays welcoming even in December .

07/09/2025

Finally managed a visit to Taw Valley Organics, near Barnstaple. They are a small family owned business growing an interesting selection of herbaceous perennials using certified organic methods. One of only three nurseries in the Uk currently doing this.. Organically grown plants in peat free compost supplied in biodegradable cardboard containers, this is the future. Well worth supporting by both amateur gardeners and professionals

29/06/2025

An inspiring visit to Caisson Garden near Bath yesterday. The gardens have been created since 2010 around the abandoned 19th century canal and series of locks of the short lived Somerset Coal Canal. Water, in multiple forms, is a special feature of the gardens. I enjoyed also the soft and restrained planting, with box and yew topiary sprinkled amongst very relaxed herbaceous borders and fruit trees . Extensive wildflower meadows feature many orchids at this time of year.

13/06/2025

This is thought provoking

Recently, someone said I should stop being so “political” about gardens because gardens aren’t “political.” I think the term was used as a way to shield themselves from some uncomfortable ideas about our role on a planet we’re eroding quickly, and how responsibility for it might begin in a very personal space — our home gardens. So I came up with the following thoughts:

Gardens aren’t political statements? Sure they are. If gardens are art — and that’s how we talk about them 99% of the time (sigh) — art has a long, lively tradition of being “political.” And make no mistake, by “political” we mean thinking critically about our culture in whatever way we can: moral, ethical, socioeconomic, disrupting the status quo of systems of power, et cetera. Being “political” makes us uncomfortable, since it calls us out and asks us to look at ourselves and the world in a radical new way that stretches and challenges us. Gardens are revolutions in a time of mass extinction — they are no longer simply pretty little paintings to stroll through. Being made uncomfortable, angry, and even despondent is the first step to waking from our human supremacism and speaking the language of life again.

And then I connected the above, in my head anyway, to something else I wrote a few days earlier:

Gardens full of native plants are acts of social justice, empathy, and then compassion for other species we’ve put on the brink, as well as fostering the physical and psychological health of our own species. Gardens are a resistance to a culture of narcissism and hubris. Gardens are more than art, more than beauty for us. Urban gardens, especially, are a rewilding (not a restoring) of the broken bonds between us all, an open conversation held again where we begin to remember the languages we’ve lost, ignored, or betrayed. When we speak leafcutter bee or bobwhite quail, we remember the chorus and our own language is enriched. Without the voices of the animate world in our daily lives, our existence is a pale, sick shadow.

11/06/2025

Seen in central Exeter today, some native wildflower planting. I suppose someone has seeded this. Looking rather good I think. The tree behind is all that remains of more conventional mixed planting that I did on this same spot twenty or thirty years ago. Time moves on.

18/04/2025

Crab apple blossom making a welcome reappearance in a garden outside Exeter completed some years ago. Captured before the Bank Holiday rain!

10/04/2025

Cercis siliquastrum, the Judas Tree, with its striking rose pink flowers sprouting directly from the trunk and branches just before the heart shaped leaves unfurl. This one is in a park in Rome but it is equally at home in a UK urban garden or courtyard. It doesn’t get too big and the canopy spreads to create pleasing shade over a patio.