It’s time to fall in love with your garden again.

Design Outside.

An outdoor garden scene showing a red patio chair and table set against a green house with horizontal cladding and a window.

I love how a well-designed outdoor space can make us feel, influence how we live and come together with family & friends. I see a garden as more than just plants. It is an extension of our home, a representation of our individuality and a private place for calmness & relaxation. Our gardens can be as personal and distinctive as the inside of our homes, designed to support the rhythm of a busy life.

This is Mark Hardy. He is wearing glasses and has short light-colored hair, wearing a dark button-up shirt, standing in front of a wooden fence.

A Creative at heart.

I had a successful career in Marketing & PR for nearly 30 years (at Disney, PlayStation, Sony Music and more) and loved every minute of it. I thrived on the creativity, the buzz, working all over the world and making big ideas happen.

Then I turned 50 and decided to take a beat. To think about who I was, where I’d got to and how I wanted to spend the next chapter of my life. Big moment! I left London and moved to Whitstable on the East Kent coast. I love living near the sea, the big epic skies and being surrounded by wild open spaces.

Later in life, I yearned to pick up a pencil again and get back to being a creative. I decided to retrain to be a Garden & Landscape Designer.

Black ink sketches of abstract circular and curving shapes on white paper, laid flat on a surface with some pencil lines visible.

Group of people around a table discussing landscape design plans, with drawings and notebooks on the table.

Think Outside.

I studied Garden Design at the prestigious Inchbald School of Design in Chelsea, London. I graduated with a Distinction and was awarded ‘The Dean & Founders Prize’ for Garden Design.

It was such an incredible experience to train under the best Garden & Landscape Designers in the industry, led by Andrew Duff MSGD. Here I turned my passion for gardening into something special. I was taught how to create beautiful, functioning spaces from a blank canvas. How to arrange ‘mass & void’, build journeys on a visual, physical and emotional level, and how to think about the distribution of colour, texture and form. This might all sound very theoretical but understanding these principles (and more) is what allows a good garden designer to get started.

Digital illustration of a red wax seal with the letters 'isd' embossed inside, set against a white background, with the word 'Inchbald graduate' below. This seal proves Mark Hardy is a graduate of this design school.

Play Outside.

You don’t need a huge outdoor space to make it personal to you, and you certainly don’t need to be a horticulturalist to nurture & grow lovely plants. All you need is an idea of how you’d like to use your garden, and I’ll create a extra special design just for you.

How I Work