J imi Blake trained at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland and was appointed head gardener at Airfield estate in Dublin at twenty-one — eleven years in which he was given the room to find his own planting style, before securing twenty acres of the family land in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains and beginning, in 2002, the garden that has occupied him since.
Hunting Brook is a working laboratory for unlikely plant combinations: tender exotics alongside meadow grasses, a sand garden cut into the hillside, woodland borders that test what a Wicklow climate will actually take. It now houses one of the largest snowdrop collections in Ireland — more than eight hundred catalogued cultivars — and has been called, by the Telegraph, the work of one of the world's new plant gurus.
Blake teaches at the garden, lectures internationally, and runs an online gardening community from the site. With Noel Kingsbury he wrote A Beautiful Obsession — a portrait of Hunting Brook and the thinking behind it.
