Third generation, and the first to draw it down.

My name is Dawn Wellbelove and I design gardens from Dunton Green, a couple of minutes outside Sevenoaks. I am the third generation of gardeners in my family, which mostly means I grew up thinking that being handed a trowel was a treat and that everybody knew what a dahlia tuber looked like in January.

What changed was learning to draw it properly. I trained at the British Academy of Garden Design and, in my own account of it, graduated with distinction; I am a pre-member of the Society of Garden Designers. The training is what turns instinct about plants into something a landscape gardener can build from, which is a very different skill from being good at gardening.

The practice is just me, and that is the point rather than a stage on the way to something larger. The person who walks your garden at the first meeting is the person drawing both layouts, building the 3D model, writing the planting plan and handing over the working plan. There is nobody to hand you on to and nothing to get lost in translation.

The gardens I most enjoy are for people who have enjoyment at heart and have decided to invest properly in the space — usually a garden that is under-used rather than unloved. The style I keep coming back to is contemporary and low-maintenance, with enough year-round structure that it still looks composed in February. A garden that demands three hours every Saturday is a garden you eventually resent, and that is a design failure rather than yours.