GARDEN WRITING
SUSIE HAS BEEN WRITING ABOUT GARDENS FOR THE PAST THIRTY YEARS
Susie’s work has appeared in many magazines, including The English Garden, Homes and Gardens, BBC Countryfile magazine, the Garden Design Journal, Amateur Gardening and Garden News. Susie and David’s garden is featured in Clive Nicholl’s book Brilliant English Gardens.
Susie has written about making the garden in Second Nature: The Story of a Naturalist’s Garden published by Saraband. Her fascination with moths inspired her book The Gardener and the Moth: Planting for Moths and Butterflies, also published by Saraband, and her latest title Nature’s Almanac: A Gift for Every Day of the Year is due out in March 2026.
Susie is the garden columnist for the Northumbrian magazine and The English Garden ran a major 2 year series on how Susie and her husband David made their garden from scratch in Northumberland (written by Susie & featuring many of her own photos). She regularly reviews books for the Garden Design Journal.
Readers were able to follow the ups and downs, the experiments and excitement of creating a garden from a rock-strewn, weed-filled patch, turning it in to an ebullient, flowing, dynamic garden full of wildlife. Her book Gardens of Northumberland and the Borders is the definitive guide to gardens of the north and is illustrated with the photographs of Simon Fraser.
In 2011, Susie began contributing to the Guardian Country Diary, the century-old column on natural history and the countryside. She writes about the wildlife and landscape around her North Pennine home, of curlews and lapwings on the moors, dippers and sea trout in the East Allen river, flowers of upland hay meadows, starry nights and the Aurora.
Much is observed from her own garden with tawny owls rearing their chicks, slow worms in the garden meadow as well as hedgehogs and stoats in ermine. Planted for pollinators, the garden is full of bees, butterflies, hover flies and moths. Susie sets a moth trap each week submitting the data to the county records and the Garden Moth Scheme. Her radio work includes a walk in a woodland that was broadcast on Radio 4’s PM programme.
Susie has contributed to a book and art project to raise funds to help the UK’s most threatened birds. ‘Red 67’ highlights and celebrates the birds on the ‘Red List’ and Susie has written about the elusive hawfinch. Throughout 2021 she wrote a blog for CPRE The Countryside Charity on what to look for in nature each month. Her work is included in the anthology of nature writing, North Country, published by Saraband, and in Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary 2018-2024.
With her knowledge of the area, Susie writes lively descriptions of walks in Northern England for the Guardian, including where to stay and where to eat. On a barge trip on the Caledonian Canal, she wrote about Scotland’s history, castles, waterfalls and wildlife, of ospreys on the lochs and dolphins in the Moray Firth. Travel articles on Gothenburg and surrounding area, and on the gardens of Västsverige resulted from her trips to Sweden.
A member of the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild, Susie can illustrate her articles with her own photographs, although her text has also been used to accompany the work of renowned photographers such as Allan Polock-Morris and Andrea Jones.
SUSIE’S COUNTRY DIARIES FOR THE GUARDIAN
Read Diaries
