Avant Gardeners

Jo Thompson is one of the UK's most celebrated garden designers, known for creating deeply romantic, naturalistic gardens that feel timeless, layered and full of atmosphere.  Her projects span the UK and abroad - from wildflower meadows in the English countryside to rooftop terraces in New York and coastal gardens in Italy and Brazil. 
She's a multiple award-winner at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, with several Gold medals to her name, and her designs  - ranging from private landscapes to meaningful public projects - are widely admired. 
Beyond her design practice, she's a respected teacher, author and voice in the gardening world, sharing her knowledge through books, lectures and her much-loved newsletter, The Gardening Mind. Jo's work reminds us that gardens can be both art and refuge – spaces that connect us to beauty, memory and the natural world.
Before we get to Jo's chat, Maddie and Emily are talking about:

Agapanthas (sorry!)
Snakes
Wildflower Meadows
Emma Bowen of Rising Farm
Sea salt and olive oil on vanilla icecream
Then we get into glorious Jo's chat and we cover a lot. Highlights include:
Glasshouse Project
Women in horitculture / at the Chelsea Flower Show
Designing a garden
Trypophobia

Damsen Cocktail
Jo lists a bunch of her favourite roses:
Wild Rover
Meg - climber
The Lark Ascending
Felicite-Perpetue
Adélaide d'Orléans
Ghislaine de feligonde
Blush Noisette
Bengal Crimsen
Mutablis 
Gertrude JekyllMILsures
Olivia Rose Austin
Ispahan

We're baaaaaack! And with a slightly new format. We're trying out one week where we release our chat (longer version), and the following week we'll release our guest interview. It means we can get episodes out weekly. We'll trial it and see.

We've missed the podcast so it's awesome to be back. 
Emily has knocked it out of the park with a delicious mulberry bramble (gin, mulberry cordial from our friends' tree, blackberries, lime).

Having taken more than two months off, we have so much to chat about. 
 
Including, but not limited to:
Seed saving - calendula and platypus spinach,
Drying hydrangeas thanks to Anya The Garden Fairy
We're talking about Moths - they need a rebrand.

The Almanac, Cool Climate Sowing Guide
Alnwick Garden and Millie Fleur's Poison Garden (by Christy Mandin).

Aaaand lilacs, daphne, feverfew, calendula, compost bays. 

Catch up next week when we interview (omg!) Jo Thompson!

Jodi Wilson is a bestselling author of four books, a health journalist and postpartum doula. Several years ago, she and her family packed their lives into a caravan, and set off in search of adventure, and a more simple life. After two years on the road they put down roots in Tasmania. It is here where she's embraced gardening, and written her most recent book, A Brain That Breathes, out today. 
Jodi lives, writes and gardens with her partner and their four children on the land of the punnilerpanner people in north western Tasmania
Before we get to this thought-provoking chat, Emily and Madeleine are drinking Archie Rose Straight Dry gin with some home made purple elderflower cordial.
Emily is regretting purchasing a Ginko tree, and the agapanthus keep rearing their ugly head. 
She is loving her Cerastium tomentosum - snow in summer - and Maddie's cutting is also doing quite well.
Maddie is obsessed with Sage, and wants to propagate more. She's also tried her hand at sage sticks. She's got a picnic blanket in the post and is excited for more outdoor eating-and-drinking sessions. Calendula is back, and in some beautiful colours, and she is recommending  Why Women Grow, by Alice Vincent.
Jodi has a HUGE list of books she recommends for summer, and or anytime. We've already read a couple of them and they are excellent. Can highly recommend her recommendations!

-The Mushroom Tapes by Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein
-Heart the Lover by Lily King
-Sandwich and Wreck by Catherine Newman
-The Octopus and I and A Catalogue of Love by Erin Hortle
-The Hiding Place by Kate Mildenhall
-The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
-Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
We're also banging on and singing the praises of libraries, AGAIN!

~ This season of Avant Gardeners is proudly supported by Blundstone's new series WorkLife. Launching in November and perfect for gardening. Find your local stockist here. ~
Emma Horswill was a madkeen gardener with a fine arts degree and a 9-acre block. With plans for a veggie garden and orchard, Emma turned her hand to flower farming in 2019, and since then has gone from strength to strength. 
This family run farm, called Earthenry, now grows well over 100 different varieties of seasonal and field-grown blooms, and has cultivated a dedicated community of volunteers and devotees who flock to the farm for events including garden and gossip, twilight flower picking, pick your own mornings, workshops, and seedling sales. 
Emma also breeds her own dahlias, makes made-to-order bouquets and sells organically-grown seeds. Emma, her husband Greg and their two teenage children live, work and garden in the beautiful township of Snug, on the lands of the Nuenonne people in Tasmania. 
Before we get to that, Maddie & Emily and drinking a Fin Wines' Dandelions and Bumblebees


Emily is talking about pea straw, her broody chickens and some tips she's learned from Nicky Husted, aka Purely Chickens.

We both went to the Cygnet Garden Market and bought a literal boot load of plants including Mint! Hurray. Chocolate mint, peppermint and basil mint. 
Emily is loving The Garden Curator's column in Graziher magazine about observing where the early and late light moves in the garden, and that's where to plant those frothy, tall grasses to catch the light. 

Maddie is loving the cows, Hetty McKinnon's dukkah from the Community cookbook, and having garden chats with Emily. 

This is our last episode of 2026. Thank you for being here. It means the world.

~ This season of Avant Gardeners is proudly supported by Blundstone's new series WorkLife. Launching in November and perfect for gardening. Find your local stockist here. ~
Rachel Ward's career began on screen, with standout roles in classics like The Thorn Birds before she turned her skills to directing acclaimed works including Beautiful Kate. In her sixties, Rachel's energy and focus shifted to regenerative agriculture, swapping film sets for fence lines and embarking on an ambitious overhaul of the beef farm her and her husband Bryan Brown had owned for thirty-odd years. Her brilliant documentary Rachel's Farm captures this shift as Rachel moves into her soil-health evangelist era, charting her mission to restore land and the food system. Today, she continues that momentum through Farmthru, her paddock-to-plate project designed to disrupt how regenerative farm produce is made available to consumers. 
Rachel lives, works and tends to her cattle on the land of the Gumbaynggirr people in the Nambucca Valley, New South Wales.
Before we get to Rachel's chat, Maddie and Emily are drinking Greek Frappe (metrio me gala) even though it's 9 degrees outside. Recipe from Philoxenia: A Seat At My Table by Kon Karapanagiotidis.

Emily is dreaming of abundance in the garden.
Maddie is going to try to make her own tomato powder by Lauren at Oaklea Veggie Patch.

They both visited good mate Pip Steele Wareham at The Garden at Moorfield and it was just like old times in that Pip was followed around by Maddie and Emily asking lots of annoying questions.

We visited CERES Brunswick and want to start our own version in Cygnet.
We're growing strawberries in pots and trying to get lots more creeping thyme in the garden (thank you, Connie Cao)

Maddie is thinning her fruit trees (thank you, Katie Finlay)

Rachel recommends:
We Are The Ark by Mary Reynolds,
The Creative Act by Rick Reuben,
The Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy,
Deep Listening to Nature by Andrew Skeock
Healthy Land, Happily Families and Profitable Businesses by David W Pratt
The Soil Will Save Us by Kristen Ohlson,
Holistic Management by Allan Savory

Check our Rachel's new online-ordering, kerb pick up regenerative farm produce available at Farmthru.