Only because you are standing a short distance from one of Britain’s oldest botanic gardens does a certain kind of silence fall over Royal Hospital Road in the late morning. The Chelsea Physic Garden and the English Gardening School share the same address at number 66, and the arrangement seems almost too good to be coincidental. Notebooks, secateurs, and occasionally a flask of coffee that they forgot to finish on the train are carried by students when they arrive. The school has been in operation since 1983, and it appears to have been waiting for you most mornings.
It was founded over forty years ago by Rosemary Alexander, whose influence can still be seen in the organization. The book, which she co-wrote with Anthony du Gard Pasley in 1987, is the type of hardcover that comes in used and has pencil marks in the margins. The students who actually read it can be identified. It seems that the school has always favored gradual accumulation over ostentatious reinvention, which may be why it continues to produce designers whose names you eventually recognize without knowing where they received their training.
When you look at that list, it’s a little shocking. West Cleve. Rachel de Thame, Butter Wakefield. Swift, Joe. Malde Manoj. They were brought up on the Two Good Gardeners podcast late last year by Managing Director and Course Director B Brooks, and the way the discussion developed made it evident that this is not a school that advertises itself loudly. The well-known alumni are practically a byproduct. Because the school seems to draw people in the second act of their lives, it is important to note that Brooks herself came to gardening fifteen years ago from a completely different field. Lawyers and bankers. architects. People who walk by a hornbeam hedge one day decide they want to know what they are looking at.
The courses themselves are structured around two diplomas, the Good Gardening Diploma and the Essential Garden Design Diploma, with options for distance learning and shorter courses interspersed. Plans, hard landscaping, planting design, and the entire arc are all covered in the correspondence-based Certificate in Garden Design program. In 2026, when the majority of education is provided through thirty-second videos, a correspondence course has an air of defiance. The school appears unconcerned.
It would be simple to romanticize this location, and the majority of its students most likely do, at least temporarily. However, the work is genuine. Drawing, plant identification, soil knowledge, and hours of practice that no one takes pictures of for Instagram are all required for diplomas. In comparison to the famous gardeners it has produced, the school’s own social media following is only about 14,000. You can learn something about its priorities from that gap.
It seems appropriate that Rosemary Alexander’s own garden at Sandhill is mentioned in the spring and early summer newsletters as being filmed for Gardeners’ World. The founder is still employed. A picture of a garden still. This place has a strong institutional memory that manifests itself in subtle ways, such as in the testimonies of former students who claim that the course literally changed their lives. You believe Barbara Brooks of the 2012 cohort when she says that, in part because she didn’t embellish it.
The school’s overall impact on British garden culture is more difficult to quantify. The public’s attention is dominated by the Royal Horticultural Society, and the Chelsea Flower Show receives the majority of media coverage every May. However, if you look closely at any border that has won awards, it’s likely that someone who received training at Royal Hospital Road was involved. The frequency with which the same address keeps coming up is difficult to ignore.
It remains to be seen if that subtle influence will persist for another forty years. A new generation expects to learn online, the climate is changing what survives in a London bed, and gardening as a profession is evolving. Even so, there’s a sense that the school will just keep going as it maintains its routine, administers its diplomas, and sends its pupils into the Physic Garden every morning. obstinately. Gorgeously. mostly according to its own terms.
