Interview on The Sod Show

While at RHS Tatton in July this year exhibiting our multi award-winning garden, our garden designer Michael John McGarr was interviewed by Peter Donegan from The Sod Show. We were already aware of fellow garden designer Pete's brilliant podcasts, so were honoured to be chosen to be featured. Michael had a great chat with Pete about setting up his own consultancy, the pressures of following your own creative path and designing and building show gardens. Take a listen to The Sod Show podcast below and you can always drop them a line on Twitter @sodshow to let them know you enjoyed it.  

• Categories: Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Michael John McGarr, Press coverage, RHS Tatton
• October 5th 2017

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Our RHS Tatton garden in Cheshire won three awards – including gold!

We are immensely chuffed that our Cactus-Direct: 2101 garden won triple awards at RHS Tatton 2017 in Cheshire - including the much-coveted GOLD award. On Tuesday, July 18, we were awarded a Gold medal, as well as Best Construction in Show and Best Future Spaces garden, so it's fair to say we were very happy indeed. Anyone who's read our previous blog posts about the RHS Tatton - Announcing 2101 and Countdown to RHS Tatton knows how hard we've worked and how ambitious our garden concept was to execute. The judging process for RHS Shows is notoriously tough, and we worked extremely hard

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Michael John McGarr, RHS Tatton, Show gardens, Sponsorship
• July 20th 2017

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Planting list for RHS Tatton

Our RHS Tatton show garden is going absolutely amazingly and we're being asked for our planting list by so many people already that we thought we'd make it available to everyone. Be sure to tag us @warnesmcgarr if you post a photo of our Cactus-direct: 2101 garden on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Garden title: 2101 Main sponsor: cactus-direct.co.uk Garden designer: Michael John McGarr Contractor/ builder: Warnes McGarr & Co Ltd   Planting list Yucca Filifera Yucca Rostrata Yucca glorisoa Trithrinax campestris Nannorrhops ritchiana Butia odorata Vitis vinifera muscat Echinocactus grusonii (600mm wide specimen barrel cacti) Polaskia Chichipe (1500mm high specimen cacti) Pinus sylvestris Alnus glutinosa Betula nigra Sanguisorba "tanna" Iris germanica Sedum "purple emperor" Euphorbia characias Verbena bonariensis Carex morrowii Persicaria Veronicastrum Primula vialii Hosta Thalictrum Geranium Geum Hemerocallis Lobelia hapsdens blue Eupatorium baby Joe Thymus

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, RHS Tatton, Show gardens, Sponsorship
• July 20th 2017

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RHS Tatton – the countdown to ‘2101’ continues

by Michael John McGarr With one month until we begin on site at RHS Tatton in Knutsford, it's all systems go here at Warnes McGarr & Co HQ in Greater Manchester. RHS Tatton takes place at Tatton Park in Cheshire from July 19 - 23, and we start the garden design build onsite from Monday, July 3. Last year, we achieved a silver medal at RHS Tatton with our 'From Hall to Home' garden and a gold medal, plus Best Construction in Show at BBC Gardeners World in Birmingham. So we're definitely looking to increase our medal count this year. Our Tatton garden design

• Categories: Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, RHS Tatton, Show gardens
• June 2nd 2017

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Announcing 2101 – our RHS Tatton show garden

By Michael John McGarr Here at Warnes McGarr & Co we’re incredibly pleased to announce that our show garden design has been accepted for RHS Tatton 2017 in Cheshire. The garden is called simply ‘2101’ – and it’s going to be something of a showstopper. This will be our third year on the run at the Tatton Flower Show, in Knutsford, and we’re not ashamed to say that we’re going for gold. Our show garden will be in the Future Spaces category and it imagines what the average British garden will look like in the year 2101. New climate change models predict that by

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, RHS Tatton, Show gardens, Sponsorship
• March 29th 2017

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Highly commended in the APL awards!

We took a trip down to London on Friday to attend the Association of Professional Landscapers’ annual awards. And we were incredibly pleased to find that a garden we designed and built was highly commended in the hard landscaping category. The garden, in Wigan, is an ultra-contemporary design, bringing together large format porcelain, with composite decking to provide interest. The homeowners had just invested in a new extension, so wanted their garden landscaped with different areas to relax, socialise and cook outdoors. To soften the hard landscaping elements, some colourful textural planting and edible plants were included, with plenty to provide birds

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Garden design, Lancashire, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, Residential garden, Wigan
• March 21st 2017

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Garden designer Michael John McGarr featured in Lancashire Life

We are really pleased to be featured in February’s issue of Lancashire Life, with a feature about our chief creative and company founder Michael John McGarr. The interview by garden expert and photographer Linda Viney took place last summer so we’ve been eagerly awaiting the appearance of this feature. Linda came out to visit Michael at our new office and also at his own garden to chat about our show gardens, winning numerous awards, future plans and our business ethos. At the time, we had just begun our re-branding process and the new website was just being built so a lot

• Categories: Business news, Garden design, Lancashire, Press coverage, Wigan
• January 31st 2017

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Seeking sponsorship and a great partnership

Here at Warnes McGarr & Co Ltd, while everyone else is still lazily checking their emails and eating up leftover chocolate, we’ll be frantically finishing our design for RHS Tatton 2017 in time for the mid-January deadline. With this being our third year of exhibiting at the Cheshire show, we know this year’s design is going to be a big showstopper. After two years of being awarded silver, we’re not ashamed to say we’re going for a gold this year. Designing a show garden is the perfect opportunity for us to unleash our creativity across design, planting and hard landscaping, but also

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Lancashire, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, Show gardens, Sponsorship
• January 9th 2017

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Looking back at 2016 – what a fantastic year!

By Michael John McGarr Although we’ve still been working hard in our office this week, it’s nice to take a little time to think about how much we’ve achieved in 2016. There’s been a lot of change and new direction this year and we’ve really laid the foundations for growing our business next year, with a very clear strategy. So here’s our round up of 2016, with some thoughts about what we’re doing in 2017. Winning the APL awards 2016 Back in March this year, we won an APL commendation for a garden we designed and landscaped in Wigan, in the under £20,000

• Categories: Business news, Garden design, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, Show gardens, Wigan
• December 30th 2016

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New branding and direction for our garden design business

After a lot of thinking about growth and where we want to go with our work, we made the decision to re-brand our garden design business name, our logo and our website to reflect our new direction. Having previously been called MJM Landscape for our domestic work and Living Space for our show garden work, we decided that we needed one name to cover all our garden design work and consultancy. Our head of construction Robert Warnes had become a business partner of company founder and designer Michael McGarr a while back, but now the partnership has been formalised with our new

• Categories: Business news
• September 15th 2016

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Tatton brings us another medal for our list of awards

As Monty Don calls it, ‘The great garden party in the North’, RHS Tatton (July 19-23) was fabulous this year, with a perfect heatwave hitting Cheshire AND we won a silver – our third award of the summer. We can’t lie to you – doing two show gardens in the space of four weeks was tough. Building a show garden means 15 hour days and can take up to two weeks from digging the foundations to dusting off the floor tiles with our socks, minutes before the judges walk round. We always work to incredibly high standards BUT RHS judges are

• Categories: Awards, Business news, Cheshire, Garden design, Landscape design, Michael John McGarr, RHS Tatton, Show gardens, Wigan
• July 24th 2016

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Double award winner at Gardeners’ World Live

We’re all celebrating here at WM design Studio after winning a gold medal and the Best Construction award at the BBC Gardeners’ World Live Show in Birmingham,  June 16-19. Our garden was called Eat and Shelter, which featured the amazing Alfa outdoor wood-burning pizza oven we supply, as well as a fire/ ice table and a very contemporary corten steel pergola. This garden utterly represents everything we do here at Warnes McGarr & Co. The outdoor kitchen has fast become our signature design, because it represents a new trend in how people use their gardens. In addition to this, it represents

• Categories: Awards, Business news
• June 19th 2016

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