For three decades, Nigel Dunnett worked out what a city planting could be — not as decoration, not as horticulture's polite cousin, but as a serious response to where, and how, and with what we now grow plants in public. He read Botany at Bristol, took his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 1996, and remained in its School of Architecture and Landscape until his death, becoming Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture in 2011.
His Olympic Park meadows, conceived with James Hitchmough and Sarah Price for the London 2012 Games, set a new precedent for what a public landscape might look like in the early years of the twenty-first century: ecologically grounded, visually generous, and made to be looked at without apology. His subsequent work — the Barbican plantings, the rooftop meadows of King's Cross, the Grey to Green scheme in Sheffield, the Superbloom moat at the Tower of London — shaped a generation's thinking about what municipal planting can do, and how it might be made to last. He founded Pictorial Meadows in 1998 and was appointed Royal Designer for Industry in 2023.
He was the author of Naturalistic Planting Design, the definitive account of his practice, written for gardeners and designers who want the principles, the plant communities and the design grammar behind the public work.
Nigel Dunnett died on 26 April 2026, aged 63.
