P hilip Oostenbrink taught horticulture in the Netherlands for eight years before moving to England, and has been Head Gardener at Walmer Castle in East Kent since 2020. His jungle-plant obsession, as he calls it, took hold after a trip to Tresco on the Isles of Scilly — the kind of trip from which a plantsman returns with a long list and an entirely different idea of what counts as hardy.
At Walmer he has been turning the castle's dry moat — a sunken microclimate sheltered from wind and frost — into a collection of large-leaved exotics, with multiple cultivars of Tetrapanax from Taiwan and southern China alongside hardy palms and bananas. He holds four National Plant Collections (Aspidistra, variegated and yellow-leaved Convallaria, Hakonechloa macra and Ophiopogon japonicus), exhibited together at RHS Hampton Court in 2021, and serves as Plant Heritage Collections Coordinator for Kent.
He writes for The Garden and the Professional Gardeners' Guild magazine, has appeared on Gardeners' World, and is a regular voice on BBC Radio Kent. His book The Jungle Garden is a working guide to bringing the houseplant aesthetic out into the open ground — a study of hardy, often big-leaved foliage plants for the small and shaded gardens where flowers tend to disappoint.
