Caroline Donald

Caroline Donald is a freelance editor and writer. Her latest endeavour is interviewing I9 garden owners and their canine companions chosen and photographed by India Hobson in Hounds and Gardens, published by Quadrille in April 2027.

For 20 years she was the gardening editor of The Sunday Times newspaper, and also writes for publications such as The Daily Telegraph, House & Garden, Veranda, Architectural Digest and Country Life, travelling throughout the UK and around the world to talk to owners about what their gardens means to them. The Generous Gardener, published in 2018, is a collection of more than 40 of her interviews. She has also contributed to Beyond the Town: Conversations of Art and Land and Piet Blankhaert Gardens, which came out in 2024.

Dachshunds - The Long and the Short of Them celebrates the vertically challenged but spirited breed and was published by Pimpernel Press in October 2020. She has curated The Art of the Garden, two successful series At Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton, Somerset examining the relationships between landscape and art. Many of these can be seen on You Tube, including Piet Oudolf, Dan Pearson, Tom Stuart-Smith, Kim Wilkie, Victoria Glendinning and Penelope Hobhouse. She has also arranged garden design-based talks at Messums gallery in Tisbury, Wiltshire.

Caroline’s first "garden" was a clump of daffodils she uprooted at her childhood home in Scotland to replant under an old apple tree, in the hopes that one day a tree house would be built there. The tree house remains a fantasy but she is still gardening, now in a quarter of an acre around her cottage in Somerset, where the resident dachshunds Mitzi von Schnitzel and Heidi Wirth are determined to turn the lawn into a golf course by digging holes all over it.