A geologist who ended up drawing gardens.

My name is Chris Wild and I design gardens from Royal Tunbridge Wells. It started in my grandad's garden, which is where most of this sort of thing starts, and carried on through a part-time job at a garden centre — the stage where you learn plant names properly because somebody keeps asking you for them.

I read Geology and Geography at the University of Brighton and graduated in 2011 with first-class honours. There was then a brief and instructive spell in finance in the City, which mostly taught me that I wanted to be outdoors. In 2016 I attended the British Academy of Garden Design and gained a Post Graduate Diploma in Garden Design with Distinction, which is what turned an instinct about plants into drawings a contractor can build from.

The geology has never really left. When I take soil samples and assess aspect at the survey stage, I am reading the same things I was taught to read in the field: what the ground is made of, how water moves through it, which way the slope and the light run. Gardens in this part of Kent sit on wildly different ground within a mile of each other, and that single fact explains more failed planting schemes than any amount of bad taste.

The practice is one person, and that is deliberate rather than a stage on the way to something bigger. The same pair of hands does the consultation, the survey, the concept, the master plan and the coordination on site — so there is nobody to be passed on to, and you always know exactly who to ring.