Kate Shutt.

Kate studied art, graphic design and illustration at Reigate Art School and then at Northbrook College, and came to garden design afterwards, studying design and planting at Merrist Wood College. It is an unusual order, and it shows in the work: the drawings are proper drawings, the compositions are composed, and colour is treated as a decision rather than an accident of whatever was flowering at the nursery that week.

Twenty years in the industry followed, including time with a leading London garden design practice before setting up on her own. What she took from that period is less about style than about co-ordination — that the difference between a good garden and a disappointing one is almost always in the handovers, and that the way to fix the handovers is not to have any.

So Surrey Hills Garden Design is deliberately arranged as one practice rather than a chain of subcontracts. Kate designs, and then project-manages a settled network of landscapers, bricklayers and growers through the build and the planting, as your single point of contact throughout. It is an independent, owner-led business — there is no account manager, and no one else to be passed to.

The practice takes its name from the landscape it works in. Most projects sit within sight of the North Downs, on Surrey chalk or greensand, in gardens that already have mature trees, old walls or an awkward slope to answer to. Designing for that ground, rather than importing a look from somewhere flatter and drier, is more or less the whole job.