Garden designer Sargeant takes soil seriously and she wants gardeners to as well.
She was one of the hosts at the Society of Garden Designer awards 2025. When she was SGD chair a decade ago, it was difficult to get enough entries for the sustainability category. But she said sustainability is so embedded the category may be dropped in the future.
Most practical gardening books start with knowing your plot, with centre at the centre. Sargeant digs deeper into soil science. Soil is changing because of climate change and soil is becoming degraded because it has been treated badly by many gardeners and farmers.
Sargeant, who designed the Blue Peter Discover Garden soil garden at Chelsea in 2022, as well as the headline-making 2016 Modern Slavery Garden, talks about what type of growing medium to use for what plant.
There's step-by-steps and guides to improving your soil. Acid or alkaline, clay or chalk, whatever you have got, you can adapt your planting to fit. Plant alkaline-loving plants such as lavender, irises, clematis, daphne, viburnums rather than trying to change the chemistry.
The "Nirvana, that all gardeners aspire to, is a dark, moist, crumbly soil – the texture of a fruit crumble topping mix". Yum. But what soil gets is a PR problem, "not helped by the rather dry explanations of it that scientists tend to give us".
Not getting dirty, fear of germs and washing mud off are the noises you hear around soil. But don't be scared, says Sargeant, read this book and dig in.
