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About Little Garden Shop
A small, carefully curated shop for people who love their gardens, with every piece chosen by hand by garden designer Claudia de Yong.
The person behind the shop
My name is Claudia de Yong. I am a garden designer and consultant, and designing romantic gardens has been my passion for a very long time. Over the years I have won medals at RHS shows and at BBC Gardeners’ World Live, along with creating gardens and water features for private clients across England and Europe.
Little Garden Shop grew out of the way I work. When I design a garden I source materials as locally as I can, partly to cut down the carbon footprint of transporting them and partly because using skilled artisan craftsmen and women helps keep those trades alive. The shop is that same habit, opened up to everybody else.
A little background
I have designed and built show gardens since 2002, winning eight medals at RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show among them Gold and the Tudor Rose. In 2017 my garden at BBC Gardeners’ World Live took Gold and Best in Show.
I write a monthly column for Houzz UK, appeared on the fiftieth anniversary episode of BBC Gardeners’ World, and my work has been featured in Homes & Gardens, House & Garden, The English Home, Gardens and Period Living.
Chosen by hand, one piece at a time
I buy the way I would buy for my own garden. If a tool is not comfortable in the hand, it does not go in. If a pot will not survive a hard winter outside, it does not go in. If something is beautiful but useless, it needs to be very beautiful indeed.
That means the shop is deliberately small. You will not find hundreds of near identical products here. You will find one good pair of snips rather than nine mediocre ones, and a reason why that particular pair is the one I use.
Keeping British craft alive
Behind most of the British made pieces in the shop is one person at a bench. A potter throwing each pot individually, so no two are quite the same size. A blacksmith forging tools much the way they were forged a century ago. A woodworker who still cuts and shapes every trug by hand.
Work like this takes longer and costs more than the factory equivalent, and that is exactly why it is disappearing. Small workshops close quietly when the orders stop coming. Buying one hand thrown pot instead of six machine pressed ones is a small thing, but it is the thing that keeps a workshop open.
Pieces with a past
Alongside the new, I hunt out vintage and antique garden pieces: French trugs, copper planters, glass cloches, old terracotta worn smooth by decades outside, treen and folk art.
These are almost always one of a kind. When a piece sells, that is genuinely the end of it, so the vintage section is worth checking now and again if you are after something unusual.
How we send things out
We reuse and recycle packaging wherever we possibly can. It is not always the prettiest parcel to arrive on your doorstep, and we make no apology for that. We only use plastic where we have not yet found an alternative that will get a fragile piece to you in one piece, and where we do, we would ask you to recycle it.
If you are ordering several items, do get in touch and we will work out a combined shipping rate rather than charging you twice over.
Garden design and consultations
Alongside the shop, I take on garden design projects and consultations across England and Europe. If you are planning a garden, reworking a difficult corner, or would simply like a second opinion from someone who has done it a few hundred times, I would be glad to hear from you.
Keep in touch
New pieces arrive regularly and vintage finds sell on quickly, so the shop is rarely the same twice. The newsletter goes out monthly with what has just landed, and Instagram is where I share what I am working on day to day.
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