Design and build are one job.
A garden designed by one team and built by another is a compromise visible in the final work. We do both, with the same hands, because that's the only way the drawings survive contact with the soil.
How a barn became a landscape studio.
David Whitfield trained as an architect, fell out of love with offices, and started Heritage Gardens in 1997 from the converted barn next to the family farm in Brailsford. The first commissions were small — neighbours' lawns, the vicar's borders, a memorial garden in Ashbourne — but the approach was set from the beginning.
Drawings were never handed over to a contractor. The same hands that designed each garden also built it, planted it, and came back to tend it for years afterwards. A garden, David argued then and still argues now, is not a finished product on the day the lorries leave. It's a thing that needs to grow into the design that imagined it.
A garden is not a finished product on the day the lorries leave. It's a thing that needs to grow into the design that imagined it.
Twenty-seven years in, the studio still works that way. We take on around eight commissions a year — small enough that David personally visits every site, large enough to keep a steady team of seven in skilled, well-paid work. We've turned down significantly larger projects when accepting them would have meant hiring strangers or rushing the work.
The result is a portfolio of two-hundred-and-fourteen gardens across Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the Peak District — every one of them documented, photographed, and revisited. Roughly a third of our annual work comes from former clients commissioning second projects, or recommending us to neighbours. The rest finds us through long-standing relationships with local architects, estate agents, and the regional BALI chapter.
Heritage Gardens has never advertised. This is the first website the studio has had since 2014. We aren't trying to grow.
