Yorkshire gardener wins top award while paying homage to Wuthering Heights

The garden takes its inspiration from the exposed landscapes of the Yorkshire uplands: dry-stone walls, moorland planting and the way plants and wildlife respond to sometimes unforgiving conditions.

He says the themes explored at Belvoir, in Leicestershire, can be applied in different scales with other locations.

At its heart is a dry-stone wall that creates contrasting microclimates, with cooler, shaded and more sheltered conditions on one side and warmer, nectar-rich planting on the other.

Gaps within the wall allow insects and other wildlife to move through the garden.

Mr Roberts, founder of Patterned Earth, a garden and landscape design practice in Netherton, said: “I wanted to take a little piece of the landscape I know and love in Yorkshire to Belvoir.

"The moors, dry-stone walls and plants that somehow thrive in quite unforgiving conditions have always fascinated me.

“Weathering Heights was a playful nod to Wuthering Heights, of course, but the ‘weathering’ was important too.

"The garden was really about how landscapes, plants and wildlife respond and adapt to the conditions around them.”

The garden was judged by television gardener David Domoney, head judge at the show, who announced the award; BBC Gardeners’ World presenter Adam Frost; and Belvoir Castle Head Gardener and Show Organiser Andy Tudbury.

The Belvoir success marks another step in an unusual change of direction for Mr Roberts.

After a career in health and social care, latterly leading major NHS digital and data-science programmes, he pursued his lifelong interest in plants, gardens and landscape by retraining professionally in garden design and horticulture.

He achieved distinctions in both his Garden Design Diploma at the Yorkshire School of Garden Design and his RHS horticultural studies.

This year, he was named a finalist in the Large Domestic Garden Award in the Student Design category at the national Society of Garden + Landscape

Mr Roberts said: “Gardens and plants have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

"I’ve always been fascinated by the effect that being in a garden or landscape can have on how we feel — there’s something enormously restorative about being connected to nature.”

The Yorkshire connections continued in the construction of Weathering Heights.

The garden’s dry-stone wall was built by Meltham-based dry-stone waller Richard Clegg, a multiple Chelsea Flower Show award winner, while plants for the garden were supplied by York-based Dtail Plants.