The Adam Greathead Award 2025: new recipient
We are delighted to announce that our fourth Adam Greathead Award trainee has joined us.
Ella Catherall (pictured with Nursery owner John Massey) will spend the next six months with us in John’s Garden then six months at Great Dixter .
The aim of the Adam Greathead Award is to teach good gardening practices and a love of plants. This award is made possible by funds raised from admissions to John’s Garden on Saturdays, from grants as well as generous donations. We are very much looking forward to working with Ella and watching her progress.
Ella’s first six months will be in John’s Garden at Ashwood Nurseries in the West Midlands. Here, she will be working alongside head gardener Nigel Hopes and his team, involved in planting, maintenance of shrubs, trees, conifers, herbaceous and alpines, propagation, creating and maintaining plant displays, plant association and transparency pruning. Ella will also spend time on the nursery to observe and help in the production of some of Ashwood’s speciality crops including cyclamen, lewisias, hepaticas and hellebores.
The second six months will be spent at Great Dixter, Northiam, Rye in East Sussex working with Fergus Garrett. At Dixter, she will work alongside the team on multi-layered mixed borders getting hands-on experience in Great Dixter’s unique way of layering a long-seasoned border.
Ella will be immersed in life at Great Dixter, looking at meadow management, the putting together of a sub-tropical garden, pushing and pulling work to be reactive to the weather and be more efficient, as well as understanding the complex production of plants to feed the garden.
She will get an understanding how a garden like Dixter is managed and will be part of an intense learning programme undertaken by the scholars and students at Great Dixter. The garden and estate currently ranks the 25th most biodiverse place in the UK and Ella will get an insight into why that is.
Follow Ella’s diary blog here @ella_catherall
Adam Greathead remembered:
The Award is named in memory of Adam Greathead, inspirational Head Gardener at John’s Garden from 2014-2017. Adam passed away suddenly aged 27 in 2017, a young life cut tragically short and a great loss to the world of horticulture. We hope that the Adam Greathead Award will honour his memory as well as being a lasting tribute to such a remarkable young man. Read more.
Appeal for sponsors:
If you would like to make a private donation to the Adam Greathead Award, we have collection tins positioned in our shops. Alternatively, you can send us a cheque or make a payment through online banking to: Ashwood Nurseries Limited
Account Number: 60039357 Sort code 20-27-17 Barclays Bank
Please can you send us a message via contact us or letter with your donation to enable us to acknowledge receipt and to say thank you!
Donations will be split equally between our Charity of the Year and the Adam Greathead Award unless otherwise requested.
If you would like to donate to help sponsor this award, please contact Philip Baulk, chair of the Ashwood Charitable Trust [email protected] . Your donation will help the trust to achieve their goal of offering this award annually so that the UK can have many more great horticulturists.