WRITER, EDITOR, CONSULTANT, CURATOR

About

Caroline Donald is a UK-based writer and editor, with more than 30 years of experience. While gardening has been her main subject, her  journalism and copywriting interests have included history, property, buildings, interiors, crafts and country businesses. Among publications she contributes to are The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, House & Garden,  Scottish Field and Country Life, and her editing has taken her to places as diverse as Big Boat and relaunching Historic Scotland’s in-house magazine, as well as a regimental history of the 9th/12th Lancers. Dogs, especially those of a sausage variety, are a great love and Dachshunds: the Long and the Short of Them is published by Pimpernel Press in October 2020. You can follow her wire-haired sausage dogs on Instagram @mitziundheidi and @somersetsausages.

The Generous Gardener, a collection of more than 40 of her interviews with garden owners as diverse as Lord Carrington and Kelly Brook, is taken largely from the 20 years she was Gardening Editor of The Sunday Times and is also published by Pimpernel. She has contributed several chapters to Beyond the Town: Conversations of Art and Land, published by Hauser & Wirth.

The two seasons she curated at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset including luminaries of the garden, landscape and design world, such as Penelope Hobhouse, Tom Stuart-Smith, Isabel and Julian Bannerman, Kim Wilkie, Dan Pearson, Charles Dowding and Monty Don (whom she interviewed herself) were sold out, as were talks on gardening she arranged at Messums gallery in Wiltshire. She has also chaired discussions at The Cheltenham Literature Festival, Where West Begins and the Garden Museum Literature Festival, and give talks on the many roles that gardening plays in people’s lives. Whether it is at the local Women’s Institute in Somerset, or the Garden Club of Orinda, California, she seeks that golden thread that pulls all gardeners together.

With her wealth of contacts, she now occasionally acts as a consultant for those looking for a designer or gardener to create their dream garden, or to research the history of a property. 

Originally from Scotland, she lives and gardens in Somerset, in the southwest of England.