Meet the Designer: Sarah Eberle
In CPRE’s centenary year, our RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden, On the Edge, is being brought to life by one of the most celebrated designers in horticulture: Sarah Eberle.
With over 50 years in horticulture and more RHS Chelsea gold medals in more categories than any other British designer, Sarah is known for creating gardens that are not just beautiful, but deeply meaningful – rooted in landscape, story and emotion.
But for Sarah, this garden is personal. She’d stepped back from Chelsea. So when CPRE came to her with a garden about edgelands – the overlooked countryside on the fringes of our towns and cities — she had every reason to say no.
She couldn’t.
Grown on the edge
Sarah describes herself as “a nature girl at heart.” She grew up on the fringes of a town: climbing trees, walking hedgerows, spending what she cheerfully calls her “misspent youth” in exactly the kinds of landscapes that On the Edge is about. The scrubby, overlooked, in-between places that most people walk past without a second glance.
She knows them well. And she knows how vulnerable they are.
That personal connection to the “extraordinary everyday” landscapes on our doorsteps runs through everything she does. It’s why this commission felt less like a professional decision and more like a homecoming.
Design as storytelling
For Sarah, every garden begins with a story. She describes the process like writing a novel: finding the central idea first, then fleshing out the detail until the whole thing feels alive and real. At Chelsea, where visitors might pause for thirty seconds, that story has to be immediate.
In the ‘On the Edge’ garden, that layered invitation to look is everywhere: in the naturalistic planting that celebrates native wildflowers often dismissed as weeds; in the fallen tree carved into a guardian figure — Gaia, or Mother Nature — still supporting life; in the dry-stone wall that snakes through the landscape like a boundary slowly being reclaimed.
Beauty in the ordinary
A thread running through Sarah’s work is a belief that beauty isn’t something reserved for rare or pristine places. It’s here, in the places we overlook. In the hedgerow at the edge of a retail park. In the wildflowers pushing through a fly-tipped verge.
It’s a reframing with big implications. If we can learn to see value in the ordinary – in the edgelands, the in-between spaces, the places no one planned – we might start to protect them too.
Resilience, recovery – and people
At its heart, the ‘On the Edge’ garden tells a story of recovery. A neglected space. A community coming together. Nature returning. But Sarah is clear that nature recovery can’t be told without people at the centre of it.
The garden shows that this is possible. That resilience isn’t abstract – it’s visible, tangible, growing. You can see the hand of people in it, and you can see how nature is already responding.
A garden with a second life
Like all Project Giving Back gardens, On the Edge won’t end at Chelsea. After the show, it will be relocated to Sheffield – a city with its own deep history of green belt campaigning, much of it thanks to Ethel Haythornthwaite, one of CPRE’s earliest champions. The garden will take root in a regenerated community space, carrying its message into everyday life long after the show closes.
For Sarah, that legacy is part of what made this commission worth saying yes to. These gardens, she believes, need a life beyond the showground.
An invitation to look again
What Sarah ultimately hopes for – from every person who stops at On the Edge, even just for a moment – is connection. A sense that these places matter. That beauty is right here, on the edge.
And from that feeling, perhaps something more: the motivation to get involved, to look after the edgelands on their own doorstep, to join a cause that’s been fighting for the countryside for a hundred years.
