Created to celebrate the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s centenary year, its ‘On the Edge’ garden - by Devon-born landscape designer Sarah Eberle - has been awarded a Gold Medal and the title of Garden of the Year at RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

Sarah, the most decorated British designer at RHS Chelsea to date, grew up in Devon, spending much of her childhood on the edge of Dartmoor and in Dartmouth.

She has spoken about her long connection to the landscape and countryside and credits her rural Devon upbringing as the inspiration for her winning collaboration with CPRE.

Sarah describes herself as “a nature girl at heart.”

She grew up on the fringes of a town: climbing trees, walking hedgerows, spending what she cheerfully calls her “misspent youth” in exactly the kinds of landscapes that On the Edge is about. The scrubby, overlooked, in-between places that most people walk past without a second glance – the vulnerable areas of countryside around our towns and cities that are under the most threat from developers.

Sarah’s striking ‘On the Edge’ garden features naturalistic planting that celebrates native wildflowers often dismissed as weeds, a fallen tree carved into the figure of Gaia or Mother Nature, and a dry-stone wall that snakes through the landscape like a boundary slowly being reclaimed.

Sarah says, “Having thought I had retired from creating gardens at Chelsea, the Campaign to Protect Rural England changed my mind.

This garden’s mission is very personal to me.

I am a country girl through and through, so I embody the same message and beliefs that the Campaign to Protect Rural England and this garden hold.”

CPRE’s ‘edgelands’ campaign seeks to protect the countryside immediately adjacent to towns and cities.

CPRE believes we should focus on developing the upwards of 1.4 million brownfield sites available nationally, which it has identified so far.