The Swiss garden designer Anna Vogel credits the perennial borders at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris as her early inspiration. A frequent Gold Medal winner at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Vogel is known for planting schemes that prioritise movement, transparency, and a painterly approach to light. In a rare interview, she shares the hard-won principles that guide her award-winning work.
From Parisian Borders to Chelsea Gold
Vogel’s career began not in horticulture but in textile design, an influence still visible in the way she layers textures and weaves drifts of colour. “Fabric taught me about opacity and sheerness,” she says. “I think of Stipa tenuissima as a silk veil and Echinops ritro as a heavy brocade.” After retraining at the Lullington College of Garden Design, she spent three years at the renowned perennial nursery Beth Chatto’s Gardens in Essex, where the mantra “right plant, right place” became a cornerstone of her practice.
Her first Chelsea show garden, a sun-drenched dry garden for the charity WaterAid, won a Silver-Gilt medal in 2016. Since then she has returned three times, securing Gold in 2019 and 2022 with immersive, grass-rich designs. “An award-winning garden is not about rare plants,” Vogel insists. “It is about revealing the ordinary in an extraordinary way.”
The Principles of Movement and Transparency
Vogel’s signature is a planting style that never feels static. She builds borders that shift with the slightest breeze, using airy perennials and ornamental grasses as a structural framework. “Solid blocks of evergreens have their place, but I want the viewer to see through the planting—to the fence, to the next layer, to the light beyond.” Transparency is achieved by choosing plants with open habits: diaphanous grasses like Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’, branching perennials such as Verbena bonariensis, and tall, see-through seedheads like Thalictrum delavayi.
“A garden should never feel static. Even on the stillest day, a blade of grass can catch the light and transform the entire space completely.”
Layering height is equally critical. She recommends a basic scaffold of three tiers: a foreground of mounding, low-texture plants (Alchemilla mollis, Sesleria autumnalis), a middle band of muscular perennials (Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’, Sanguisorba officinalis), and a top canopy of airy wands and umbels. This vertical stacking allows light to penetrate, reducing that heavy, over-stuffed look that can defeat even a well-stocked border.
Summer Stars for a Shimmering Border
For gardeners looking to capture the spirit of a Vogel planting right now, she singles out a handful of reliable performers that peak during the warmer months. Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ offers fine, steely foliage that turns ruby-red in late summer and catches low-angle sunlight beautifully. “I pair it with the lime-green froth of Euphorbia corallioides,” she notes. “The contrast is electric without being garish.”
Other summer stalwarts include Gaura lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’, whose wand-like stems seem to float, and the mauve pincushions of Knautia macedonica. For a cool palette, Vogel often uses Eryngium yuccifolium, a rattlesnake master with spherical, silver-blue flower heads, available from specialist US nurseries like Plant Delights Nursery in North Carolina. In the UK, she sources Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ from Marchants Hardy Plants in East Sussex for its unmatched deep crimson thistles.
Transparency reaches its peak with the airy umbels of Selinum wallichianum and the towering, shimmering stems of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Malepartus’. Vogel stresses that these plants are not “low-maintenance novelties” but well-behaved perennials if given the right conditions: free-draining soil for grasses, a sunny aspect for most, and enough room for their natural spread.
Designing for Small Spaces: Lessons in Scale
Even a modest city garden can borrow Vogel’s techniques of movement. She argues that the biggest mistake in small spaces is over-planting with bulky shrubs. “You lose all sense of depth. Instead, use vertical skeletons that draw the eye upward and out.” Tall, narrow elements such as Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ or the upright form of Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Album’ create a feeling of height without closing in the edges.
She also encourages the use of transparent perennials near paths and seating areas, where a breeze can animate the scene and prevent a sense of claustrophobia. For very tight plots, Vogel often turns to grasses like Stipa ichu from Knoll Gardens in Dorset, a specialist grower of ornamental grasses. “One large pot of Stipa ichu on a balcony, backlit by the morning sun, can feel like a private meadow,” she says.
In permanent hard landscaping, she favours reflective surfaces—a stainless-steel water bowl, a polished concrete seat, or even a dark, still pool—that catch fragments of planting and sky. These amplify light and make a restricted area feel less tethered to its boundaries.
The Maintenance Myth: How to Keep a Naturalistic Garden Looking Good
A common fear among home gardeners is that a loose, grass-heavy design will quickly descend into an untidy mess. Vogel counters that a naturalistic aesthetic requires more thoughtful care, not less. “It is all about editing at the right moment.” She advises a two-stage approach: an early summer ‘Chelsea chop’ to delay flowering and encourage bushiness on stalwarts like Helenium and Sedum, followed by a rigorous late-winter clear-up. Unlike traditional herbaceous borders, where everything is cut to the ground in autumn, Vogel leaves seedheads and grasses standing through the cold months to provide structure and a “silvery, sculptural quality in low light.” Then in March she cuts back, shreds and mulches heavily with well-rotted compost.
She is adamant that real-world gardens cannot chase the perfection of a show garden. “Accept that things will move. Self-seeders like Eryngium giganteum will wander. That is not a flaw, it is the garden’s own intelligence. Just edit the seedlings you don’t want.” For those who worry about gaps, she recommends a matrix of low-growing filler plants—Geranium ‘Rozanne’, or the tiny white stars of Calamintha nepeta subsp. nepeta—which knit the space while taller players come and go.
Sourcing Plants That Perform
Vogel is a relentless advocate for buying from specialist nurseries rather than general garden centres, insisting that plant quality and provenance make a decisive difference. For grasses, she swears by Knoll Gardens and Picton Garden in Herefordshire for asters and late-season colour. In Continental Europe she relies on Kwekerij Arborealis in the Netherlands for unusual perennials grown in peat-free compost. “Ask your nursery how the plant was grown. A grass raised under plastic with high nitrogen will collapse at the first wind. Buy lean, hardened stock.”
She also urges gardeners to look beyond the usual retail cycle. Many specialist nurseries hold open days and plant fairs during summer, offering a chance to see mature specimens in sod, not in a catalogue thumbnail. Events at Great Dixter or RHS Wisley often include curated plant sales that allow side-by-side comparisons before buying. Vogel’s final advice is practical: plant in odd numbers, except when using a single architectural specimen as an anchor; label everything with a weatherproof metal tag from Alitags; and never overestimate a plant’s ability to compete with weeds in the first year—regular hoeing is the unglamorous secret behind every award-winning border. “Even at Chelsea,” she confesses, “the most critical month is April, on our knees with a weeding knife.”
Vogel’s textile background resurfaces most unexpectedly in the meticulous propagation diaries she kept during her three years at Beth Chatto’s Gardens. These notebooks, which she still consults for every new commission, record not just germination rates and flowering times but the exact “behaviour” of individual cultivars in specific soil conditions. “I learned to watch a plant for three seasons before I trusted it in a scheme,” she explains. “A single wet winter can transform a reliable performer into a flopping mess.”
One entry from August 2009 describes a trial bed of Echinacea purpurea ‘Ruby Star’ planted in the gravel garden at Elmstead Market. Vogel noted that plants on the eastern edge, receiving morning sun only, remained upright and vivid while those in full afternoon light developed a “sad, bleached appearance” by late September. This attention to microclimate became foundational to her Chelsea designs, where she famously specifies the exact orientation of every show garden border years in advance.
The diaries also reveal her early fascination with self-seeding patterns. A page dated July 2010 tracks the spread of Eryngium giganteum across a 12-metre stretch, mapped in pencil with annotations on which seedlings she allowed to remain and which she removed. This empirical approach to naturalistic planting—observation, documentation, then intervention—remains central to her method. “Most gardeners want a formula,” Vogel says. “But every site has its own logic. The plant will tell you where it wants to be.”
“A single wet winter can transform a reliable performer into a flopping mess. I learned to watch a plant for three seasons before I trusted it in a scheme.”
These handwritten records also document her early experiments with grasses. A lengthy entry from March 2011 compares three forms of Molinia caerulea sourced from Knoll Gardens, with Vogel ranking ‘Transparent’ first for its “unmatched lightness” and recommending it for “situations where the eye must travel through, not stop.” The same page includes a note to avoid overwatering Panicum virgatum in container trials—advice she now gives to every client installing a new prairie-style border.
