N oel Kingsbury has spent three decades arguing — in books, lectures and design work — for an ecological approach to planting design. He has written some twenty-five books on plants, gardens and landscape, four of them with the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, whom he first met in Holland in 1994, and has done as much as anyone in English to give the new perennial movement a working vocabulary.
He took his doctorate at the University of Sheffield in 2009, on the long-term performance of ornamental herbaceous vegetation, and teaches the Naturalistic Planting Design Course alongside Nigel Dunnett and Cassian Schmidt. With Annie Guilfoyle he runs Garden Masterclass, which has built a substantial international audience for short-form online and in-person teaching since 2020.
Kingsbury writes for Gardens Illustrated, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the New York Times, Hortus and the RHS's The Garden. With photographer Maayke de Ridder he wrote Gardens Under Big Skies, a portrait of how a new generation of Dutch designers — heirs to Mien Ruys, Henk Gerritsen and Oudolf himself — are reimagining outdoor space within the particular light, weather and landscape culture of the Netherlands.
