With mother nature as her muse, especially the rolling hills, lush forests, and wildflowers of the countryside in her native England, Lucy Hunter has channeled her fearless creativity into many roles—garden designer, floral artist, photographer, author, painter—and forged a decades-long, multidisciplinary career that’s now landed her near Charleston, South Carolina.
“I’m curious by nature; I’m always questioning, always searching,” says Hunter, who graduated from the University of Liverpool in the 1990s with a fine-arts degree. She briefly traded her paintbrushes for pencil pushing at a London bank, but when she found herself escaping her spreadsheets by retreating to the imaginary garden in her mind, one inspired by the unrestrained beauty of her grandmother’s plot, she decided to earn a degree in garden design on the side. Word of mouth turned small jobs into bigger ones until a gold medal at a Royal Horticultural Society show catapulted her to national acclaim, with the workload to match.
In 2016, after she’d spent four years transforming twenty-four acres of potato fields into a sprawling park, Hunter found her creative stores depleted. “I was really lost,” she says. “It sounds like a small thing, but I’d stopped looking at flowers.” That realization sparked a life-changing decade, one in which she wrote two books, built a massive Instagram following, taught herself photography, and delved into floral design—on her terms, rejecting the stiffness of traditional arrangements in favor of airy, wild creations. She also returned to garden design, rediscovered painting, got remarried, and perhaps most unexpectedly, moved across the pond to Kiawah Island, just south of Charleston.
Today she experiments with the Lowcountry’s native flora in her coastal garden while battling the fauna (those familiar foes squirrels and deer) and working on the hand-painted designs for her new line of botanical wallpapers and textiles. “Kiawah is an incredibly magical, almost mystical place,” Hunter says. “The light is just spectacular here, and it really feeds the romance of the story that I’m trying to tell with the fabrics and wallpapers.” The vine-like vertical stripe of her Eliza pattern, for instance, recalls the delicate lines of star jasmine and the verdant palette of the springtime marsh.
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Elizabeth Hutchison Hicklin is a Garden & Gun contributing editor and a full-time freelance writer covering hospitality and travel, arts and culture, and design. An obsessive reader and a wannabe baker, she recently left Nashville to return home to Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives with her husband, their twins, and an irrepressible golden retriever.
