Plants are the unsung heroes in the web of life. They are main players that support life in every corner of the world. In our gardens and designed spaces we harness the power of plants to connect us to the natural world – a connection that we are increasingly coming to understand is vital for our existence.
For millennia humans have attempted to control and influence the landscapes we inhabit. Throughout history we have sought to dominate and exploit nature for our own advancement. This one-sided view of the living world has brought us to a crisis point. Climate change, biodiversity and species loss, polluted rivers and seas can all be attributed to a breakdown in our understanding of how our actions impact our environment and just how interconnected our quality of life is with that of the landscapes we live, work and play in.
Plants are at the forefront of this interconnection. Plants are the most tangible element of the interface between people and landscape. The upcoming GLDA seminar will delve into the symbiotic relationship between people and plants, and examine how, as we foster a deeper knowledge and understanding of the connectedness of all things, we are compelled to reexamine our relationship with our surroundings and the profound impact of our actions.
In a world where space is at a premium and nature is often overlooked, garden and landscape designers, gardeners and anyone with an interest in plants have a vital role to play in keeping our landscapes green, vibrant and thriving. The 2026 seminar will explore how we are indelibly linked and influenced by our environment and the immense potential plants have to help us affect positive outcomes as we move forward. It will examine how plants shape our landscapes culturally and aesthetically and how, in turn, our landscapes shape us.
From enclosed medieval gardens to the modern-day ‘outdoor room’, we have attempted to separate ourselves from the wildness beyond the garden boundary. Past GLDA seminars have explored in depth how creating resilient spaces that invite nature in can help us meet the many challenges we face and how we can employ natural processes to help clean up pollution and mitigate the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.
At the heart of this theme is the understanding that plants are not mere ornaments, but active partners in the web of life, telling the story of soil, climate, culture, and community, through thoughtful designed plant communities, naturalistic planting and ecological design.
By better understanding that our wellness is intrinsically linked to the wellness of the planet we can employ simple fixes in the face of serious challenges and ensure the mark we leave is a positive one.
The seminar will also look at how gardens and our attitudes to them are changing. Gardens by their nature are never static. They are dynamic and evolving entities, changing as plants grow and interact with their environment and each other and reflecting the preoccupations of the day. Managing change and facilitating appropriate development is part and parcel of good garden stewardship. We will hear how historic gardens can be well disposed to be taken in a new direction, reflecting the energy and vision of current owners. Even older gardens that are culturally significant, when fully assessed, benefit most when deference to their past is balanced with allowing them to evolve.
The speakers will demonstrate how we can improve outcomes for our landscapes and gardens by using enlightened and dynamic design, innovations in technology and adopting informed and ecologically mindful practices that reinforce this fundamental link. The seminar will illustrate how, thanks to the observation and study of naturally resilient plant communities, and the tireless experimentation of designers and plantspeople, we have a wealth of knowledge to build on.
The speakers will share how we can apply an evolving understanding of plants and how they interact with each other and their locality to make enriching and restorative spaces that are hugely beneficial to ourselves, to nature and to the wider environment.
We are stewards of the living world; it depends on us to make good choices.
Through ecologically conscious design, conservation, habitat protection and finding a balance between the pressures of modern life and supporting the natural environment, we can ensure a better future for ourselves and nature. The speakers at the seminar will underscore how dependent we are on healthy landscapes and how engaging with the natural world comforts, recharges and invigorates and can foster well-being at the individual and community level.
Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt
A celebrated nature-focused design partnership that many will know from their Gold and best in show garden at Chelsea 2022 featuring a recreation of a natural riparian landscape and how it was restored to health by a keystone species, the beaver.
Galen Fulford
A pioneer of ecological water treatment using natural processes, he is the founder of Biomatrix Water Solutions Ltd, a company renowned for its innovative modular ecological water treatment and water management systems. These engineered floating ecosystems become living infrastructure that improve both the health and the appeal of their locations.
Margie Ruddick
US-based multi-award-winning landscape architect with a wealth of large-scale projects around the globe including the greening New York’s Queens Plaza. Her work fuses an understanding of ecological needs with high design, and she has become a guiding light in the realm of landscape restoration.
Neil Porteous
A garden consultant specialising in historic gardens Neil has a wealth of experience including as head gardener of the famed Mount Stewart garden in Co. Down. He has consulted on many of the Island of Ireland’s most historic gardens and has developed an understanding of how best to sensitively and responsibly reinvigorate historic gardens. He has observed and assessed the huge range of plants growing in these gardens putting him in a unique position to advise on selecting plants for Irish gardens based on their resilience and how they are performing in a changing climate.
SPEAKERS AT THE GLDA 2026 SEMINAR
This year’s speakers reflect a broad spectrum of ways in which designers, horticulturists and thinkers engage with the living world — from ecological technology and historic plant collections to landscape design, restoration and the philosophy of our relationship with nature.
Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt – ‘Designing with Nature’
Not too many garden designers ever appear in the pages of Esquire magazine and fewer still under the banner of “Britain’s coolest gardeners” but that is one of the design studio Urquhart and Hunt’s recent credentials.
The design partnership, Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, has become renowned for planting
combinations of great beauty that create a vibrant living tapestry for plants, people and wildlife. Their shared studio Urquhart & Hunt operates from Cork and Somerset, and they work on projects worldwide that focus on ecological restoration as the core design principle.
Their 2022 Chelsea show garden ‘A Rewilding Britain Landscape’ encapsulated their ‘nature first’ approach and highlighted the growing mood for change by winning Gold and the best-in-show accolade, a fantastic feat for the Chelsea first timers.
At Chelsea, their stunning slice of river landscape celebrated gardening in partnership with nature rather than in opposition to it. It showcased the extraordinary effect that key stone species like beavers can have on British riparian landscapes and exemplified the designers’ two-decade long exploration of the relationship between the natural world and gardens. Their unique style weaves their priority for nature connection with vernacular garden styles.
In a recent article in Homes & Gardens, the pair who are both committed environmentalists, outlined this interconnectedness in stark and striking terms: “If humans disappeared tomorrow, all other animal and plant species would carry on as normal, and they would probably even breathe a great sigh of relief.”
In their talk for the GLDA 2026 seminar entitled ‘Designing with Nature’, Lulu and Adam present their vision of the garden as a living dialogue between the natural and the cultivated world – where the gardener’s role evolves beyond maintenance to that of curator, observer, and guardian.
They will speak about their experience of creating landscapes that place ecological restoration at the heart of design and discuss some of their projects – from the public Giardini Pistola in Puglia, Italy to their celebrated collaborations with Piet Oudolf on projects including the Hauser & Wirth Art Gallery in Somerset – which explore the evolving relationship between people, nature, and place.
Galen Fulford – ‘Designing and Building Floating Gardens and Parks’
Few now doubt that we – and our planet – face huge challenges, not least how our ever-expanding urban landscapes and increases in urban populations can deal with wastewater without increasing the damage to our natural environment.
Environmental entrepreneur and inventor Galen Fulford sees no room for pessimism when it comes to creating solutions. Instead, he comes at these challenges with a big vision, a can-do attitude and desire to collaborate with nature to create a more vibrant future, bringing our waterways to life.
Galen is the founding director of Biomatrix Water, a company pioneering modular floating ecosystems that restore water quality and biodiversity in urban waterways. He has delivered hundreds of projects in twenty countries, from his native Scotland to Manila in the Philippines.
These floating platforms were initially designed as a way to tackle highly contaminated waterways to bring them back to life but they have become much more than that providing tranquil greenspace for the people and communities who live nearby. These projects are a wonderful example of interconnectedness and how working in collaboration with rather than against nature cannot just tackle individual problems but shape our landscapes and waterscapes in positive ways.
In his talk, ‘Designing and Building Floating Gardens and Parks’, he will explore international case studies and share concepts developed for Dublin’s Grand Canal Basin. He will explain how he focuses on developing solutions that combine technological advancements with the ecological benefits of natural wetlands and aquatic ecosystems.
In a recent interview Galen spoke about how his approach is all about giving nature a chance to do the work. “All of those components are purely about giving nature the toehold that it needs to thrive and flourish and do what it does best—powered by photosynthesis and biology and ecology, rather than flocculants and chemicals.”
Galen combines ecological engineering and design innovation to create living infrastructure and he is passionate about applying natural solutions to modern urban placemaking and infrastructure challenges.
Margie Ruddick – ‘Restoring Connections’
Margie Ruddick is a New York-based, multi-award-winning landscape architect. She has been recognised for her pioneering work in landscape design for over twenty years. During that time, she has developed a design ethos that demonstrates that she has a real handle on what we need to do to create engaging, absorbing spaces that are underpinned by an appreciation and innate understanding of natural landscapes.
Among her many awards, in 2006 Margie received the Rachel Carson Women in Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society, an award that recognises “visionary women whose contributions, talent, and energy have advanced conservation and environmental education locally and on a global scale.” In 2013 she was the winner of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in landscape architecture, an awards program launched by the White House Millennium Council in 2000 to recognise how innovative design enriches everyday life.
Through her designs Margie aims to reconnect people with the wider natural environment by employing a forward-thinking approach to landscape design. She recently described the times we live in as “really tempestuous both environmentally and socially.” But she also believes there has been a tangible shift to sustainability and community engagement and that by fusing an understanding of ecology, culture and good design we can dramatically improve on what have been the go to strategies of the past.
Rewilding may now be the hot topic for many but back in 2016, Margie Ruddick was one of just a few voices calling for a radical shift to a more intuitive approach to the landscapes around us. That year she published her book Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes, recommended reading for anyone interested in landscape design. In the book she guides the reader through her innovative approach to designing beautiful and meaningful landscapes under the headings of Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, and Expression.
Her highly regarded projects in the US include her transformative design for the concrete jungle that was New York’s Queens Plaza. The award-winning project promoted a new idea of nature in one of the world’s densest cities, ensuring that storm water, wind, sun, and habitat merge within an urban infrastructure to create a more sustainable vision of urban life.
Margie also travelled to Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 1996 to lead a team designing the Living Water Park, the first ecological park in China, which cleans polluted river water biologically. Margie’s non-profit ONE LANDSCAPE brings artists, scientists, policy makers, and community members together to collaborate on alternatives to conventional conservation plans for wild landscapes.
Margie, who has taught at major US universities including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, is now working on a landscape memoir entitled Restoration which will focus on what “restoration” means both in landscape design and personally. Her talk, entitled ‘Restoring Connections’, will delve into her design journey and ethos, discovering what restoration means in ecological, creative and personal terms — and look at how design can serve as a form of renewal.
In her own words: “I will talk about restoration not as the practice of restoring what once existed, but of restoring connections – between landscapes, ecosystems, communities – that have been weakened or sundered completely. I’ll talk about different approaches I have adopted to pursue this concept of restoration, on projects as disparate as a desert landscape in Mexico, a 3000-acre preserve in the Western Ghats of India, and my own back yard in the Eastern US.”
Neil Porteous – “Plants for Irish Gardens for the 21st Century – Mount Stewart, Co. Down”
Neil Porteous is an authoritative voice in garden restoration throughout the island of Ireland. A love of garden history, a passion for plant knowledge coupled with years of practical experience have led Neil Porteous to his current role as a garden consultant specialising in heritage properties that are in need of expert appraisal and care.
Respecting the “spirit of place” of each garden, his work sits at the intersection of practical horticulture and garden history, with particular attention to how original intentions, planting and management of a garden interact over time. He describes himself as having no particular planting signature but rather he listens to the garden and has a quiet flair for composition.
He holds a BSc (Hons) in Landscape Management & Horticulture and an MA in Garden History from the University of Bristol. Through his travels and study of plants in their native habitats Neil has gained an understanding of the needs of the vast range of species, many of them unusual, that populate older estates and gardens. In his spare time he propagates many unusual plants which are not commonly available in the nursery trade.
He has worked with the National Trust as a head gardener and as a gardens and parks advisor in England and Northern Ireland and with the Office of Public Works as well as for private clients. The extent of his experience puts him in a unique position to provide leadership to those involved in garden restoration projects and to help those responsible for the maintenance of historic gardens to make well-informed decisions.
Currently working in such places as Blarney Castle, Castlewellan, Clandeboye, Mount Stewart and Glenarm Castle, he stresses the importance of working closely with head gardeners and gardeners to ensure the long term viability of these historic gardens. His approach is to offer hands-on practical horticultural advice combined with an overall plan of action, respecting the past but with the focus firmly on the future to safeguard these gardens and their important plant collections.
An excellent communicator, Neil is also in demand as a speaker and speaks regularly on subjects related to garden history, plants and historic landscapes. He has contributed to radio shows such as BBC Gardeners’ Corner and BBC Gardeners’ Question Time. He also writes a monthly newsletter entitled “What to do this month in your garden”, where he offers a view into his working life and shares garden tips, as well as thoughts on interesting plants he encounters. The newsletter is available from his website –www.neilporteousgardens.com.
“Plants for Irish Gardens for the 21st Century – Mount Stewart, Co. Down”
Neil’s presentation at the 2026 Seminar will look at selecting plants on the basis of performance, adaptation and suitability in relation to Ireland’s climate and topography and will use the example of Mount Stewart Garden, Co. Down to highlight the challenges of gardening in a changeable climate. Embedded in the presentation will be a tribute to Neil’s good friend, and one of Ireland’s most respected plantsmen, Seamus O’Brien, who sadly passed away at the end of last year.
