Bringing beauty & joy into everyday life through considered and abundant planting, inviting you to slow down, notice, and breathe.
Lucy’s Story
I feel passionately that everyone has the right to experience beauty and joy in their everyday lives and want to be part of making that happen.
Plants are powerful, and gardens can be magical spaces. Spaces that hold us and our attention, that wrap around us and that we can get wrapped up in: as we notice the feel of the air on our skin, spot a pollinator making its way from flower to flower, feel the different textures to touch, observe the wind through the leaves, hear birds and insects humming with life.
When we’re focused on what is in front of us, time can slow down. We slow down. We notice. We breathe. We live.
In the city where so many people don’t have their own private garden, the need for abundant, beautiful, generous planting becomes all the more important.
Even a well-planted window box sat on a sill can make a difference to someone’s day.
It was walking the streets of Walthamstow, pushing my child’s buggy, that I first got the idea for a local window box delivery service. While sometimes lonely, those walks were punctuated with the delight of spotting beautiful plants. Moments that drew my attention. A scent. A large leaf. Something distinctive that caught my eye.
And so it was that after a 20-year career working in environmental, human rights and development charities, including organising large-scale public demonstrations on climate change, and an MA in Cultural History Memory and Identity under my belt, that I retrained, gaining a Diploma in Garden Design from renowned horticultural college Capel Manor in 2020.
Bringing all these strands together, I also initiated and direct Walk Talk Draw, a project leading guided walks of public planting. Run in partnership with an artist, they’re an opportunity for participants to find out more about the plants around them, and to spend a fun time experimenting drawing as a way of looking, slowing down, and enjoying time outdoors. An exercise in observation and appreciation.
See www.walktalkdraw.com for more information.
OUR MISSION
Together with you, I’m on a mission to increase the experience of beauty and joy for everyone every day.
Offerings
With a keen eye for detail, an intrinsic sense of balance and an intuitive feel for colour, Outfront Designs offers a range of services to meet your needs - from a full garden design package through stand-alone planting design, to our seasonal window box delivery service.
GARDEN & PLANTING DESIGN
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From courtyard-sized spaces to more expansive gardens, we love using our knowledge and expertise to create intimate, enveloping spaces that emphasize beauty, joy, and a slower pace of life. Spaces to settle in and get comfortable.
SEASONAL WINDOW BOX SERVICE
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We create and deliver seasonal window boxes four times a year. Packed with plants for small spaces, they are perfect for the front of your home, bringing beauty & joy to you and passers-by too.
FAQs - About Lucy
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I hold a Level 3 Diploma in Garden Design, awarded in 2020 after studying at renowned horticultural college Capel Manor. Through the course I studied spatial design (what goes where), learned hundreds of plant names (building on those I already knew), how to conduct a site survey and analysis, all about hard landscape materials, plant form, shape and texture, and lots more.
I also hold an NVQ in photography. Academically I have achieved the following higher education qualifications.
MA with merit, Cultural History, Memory and Identity | University of Brighton | Jan 2013
BA Hons, African & Caribbean Studies | University of Kent at Canterbury | July 1996
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I’ve been interested in gardens for a long time, I just didn’t know it! I have a keen memory of the overpowering scent of sweet peas on the night air, having returned from holiday, as a child. I thought it was marvellous.
Friends reminded me that I had drawn a plan for their garden on the back of an envelope some years before I studied garden design. And whenever I visited a friend’s home, it was always the garden that I wanted to see! Somehow that love was there, under the surface, just waiting for the right time to express itself.
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My own garden is the first that I designed, while I was doing my garden design course. It’s a regular Walthamstow terrace, about 6m wide and 9m long. What started as a plan to replace the shed, experienced mission creep! At first the garden looked incredibly bare as the raised beds went in, but as the plants have filled out and established themselves, it’s a veritable hug of a garden and I love it. My only wish is to spend more time caring for it.
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The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden in St Ives is probably my all-time favourite garden. The combination of the location, the sculptures by the incredibly inspiring Barbara Hepworth, and the planting, is perfect. I’m also a big fan of the garden at The Hepworth Wakefield. And I remember fondly visiting the garden on Lindisfarne designed by Gertrude Jekyll. The low walls around create a micro-climate, and reassuring sense of enclosure.
My parents’ garden in Dorset where I was lucky to grow up, backs on to a large field. That experience of an expanse of green will never leave me.