the founder’s story
I thought you might like to know how WILDEN began. it’s a story about me, my mum and some rhubarb. a journey of how you learn to be you in time. let me take you down …
when I was younger, so much younger than today, my family used to joke the garden was my mum’s fourth child. you spend a lot of time in Manchester waiting for the sun, but any break in the clouds she’d be out there doing the garden, digging the weeds. outside, she was free. she’d tell me:
“you don’t know what you’re missing”
but i thought it was nothing to get hung about. plus it wasn’t a garden - it was my football pitch. of course, the footy would sometimes fly into the flowerbeds, destroying her prized rhubarb and strawberries – what a scene, she almost lost her mind and I’d never hear the end of it.
it wasn’t just any old rhubarb, either – this was world-famous Timperley rhubarb. Mum taught me it tasted so good because the local soil and climate in our corner of Manchester created the perfect conditions for growing it. most of all, I loved how it magically appeared on the dinner table as a delicious rhubarb crumble. “take a piece … leave some for your brother and sister.”
sorry, too late.
but, day after day, I began to see how my mum’s passion for garden design and nature was the backdrop to every happy memory I made. from footy to bonfire nights, from summer BBQs to testing my brother’s home-made rope swings (all of which were unmitigated death-traps) my mum’s passion started to get under my skin. now, looking back, I’ll often think about what the garden meant to her; the joy she got, the care she put in. each depended on the other – in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. mum started to teach me, speaking words of wisdom. I didn’t realise it then, but she was lighting a fire in me too.
the passing seasons of the garden became the stories of our lives. mum’s love of nature became a defining chapter in mine. I still recall how it was my mum nudging me to choose landscape architecture at uni. all those years of her adoration of outdoor space at home, and on travels; her awe at the Grand Canyon, the Jurassic Coast, and Monte Verde cloud forest… it released something inside me.
I was mother nature’s son. woah.
mum’s ethos is still my north star, and her knowledge is the foundation of my beliefs for garden design in Dubai, across the GCC, and eventually, the world… my mission is to share what my mum gave me by passing on that caring passion to be a steward of our land.
I believe it’s a love we all share innately, it only needs revealing.
like me, mum didn’t start as a nature nerd but she was a hippy child of the sixties, the Beatles were her life. I reckon some of that ‘marmalade-sky’ infused her own ideas about the world around her, if you know what I mean. the design of a garden is an expression of who we are, a fulfilment of our inner selves. each moment spent in it becomes a piece of what we are. and like my mum, for me, that’s strawberry fields. forever.