about
Hi, I’m Andrea Fearon and I’m the designer behind Ivy Hill Garden Design.
My journey to garden design started way back when my grandfather taught me about his vegetable garden when I was a young girl. He had a small plot but a big passion and I didn’t realise the impact of that until much later when I had children myself. I decided it was important to share what my family had taught me and help them understand where their food comes from, so I started a vegetable garden of my own. I had mixed fortunes and there was a lot of trial and error, but 20 years later I still grow a lot of vegetables and fruit every year.
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Along the way I’ve had life challenges, not least overcoming two cancers eleven years ago and I’ve found that my garden has been my sanctuary during the more difficult times. Whenever I’m feeling a little low, a short spell in the garden helps so much.
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Since my illness I fulfilled a long held desire to study psychology and graduated with a first class honours degree which I then followed up by training as a bereavement counsellor and volunteering for a bereavement charity.
My passion for the garden always filtered through in my work and I found myself wanting to share the wellbeing benefits of it with others. So I decided to learn more and went on to study horticulture with the RHS.
I completed both level 2 and level 3 practical horticulture qualifications, learning about plants, their propagation, pests, diseases and also how to consider the environment and ecology in gardening.
The combination of my experiences led me in two directions - both to a local community garden where I am now the lead volunteer and help to support a number of people from the community in growing vegetables, fruit, flowers and other plants, and to a garden design diploma course at the Cotswold Gardening School from which I graduated with a distinction.
​I really feel that all of my experiences have equipped me to create gardens which consider people and how we can best benefit from being in our outside spaces, whilst also carefully thinking about wildlife, biodiversity and sustainability.
