About

Photo: Clive Nichols
Photo: Clive Nichols
Val Bourne is an award-winning garden writer, photographer and lecturer and she gardens on the wind-swept Cotswolds at Spring Cottage - high above Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire. Her new third of an acre garden is still very much in the making and in 2007 Val will be writing a series of six articles for the Royal Horticultural Society's The Garden magazine called 'The View from Spring Cottage' explaining how she gardens naturally without the use of chemicals - something Val has always believed in.

Val has been gardening naturally for thirty years or more and wrote about her previous Oxfordshire garden in her award-winning book 'The Natural Gardener' published by Frances Lincoln in 2004. It explains how a plant-packed garden functions successfully without chemical intervention and the purpose behind the book was to encourage others to become green gardeners too. Her latest book, 'The Winter Garden', was published in October 2006 by Cassell Illustrated and it describes how to make your garden shine in winter.

Val writes for The Daily Telegraph, The English Garden, Homes and Gardens and Saga Magazine and she is also the gardening correspondent of The Oxford Times. She was short-listed for Practical Journalist of the Year in 2001 with a miscanthus piece written for The Daily Telegraph and 'The Natural Gardener' was awarded Practical Book of the Year by the Garden Writers' Guild in November 2004.

Val lectures widely in this country and internationally and she lectured at the Barakura Garden Show in Japan and judged the gardens at The Cape Town Flower Show in 2006.

Her Natural Gardener Consultancy is designed to help individual gardeners make their garden greener and more ecologically sustainable and offers practical planting advice and individual advice.

But writing is only part of her life, her soul is in her garden and Val started growing plants at the age of three - encouraged by her Yorkshire grandmother Lucy. Her particular loves are hardy perennials and snowdrops.

Val also enjoys growing vegetables and fruit and looking after her chickens - three Silver Sussex bantams and five Barnevelder hens - with her partner Jo. Her daughters, Frances and Zoe, are keen gardeners too and she has a new granddaughter, India Jessica, born in June 2006.