It started with one neglected garden and a stubbornness about getting it right.
Donna Connolly didn’t come to plants through a formal route. There was no horticultural college, no family nursery. There was a garden she inherited when she moved to Hertfordshire that had been ignored for years, and a decision to do something about it properly.
What followed was ten years of learning by doing. Of killing plants and working out why. Of reading everything she could find, visiting gardens obsessively, and developing a instinct for what thrives in this part of the world — the soils, the microclimates, the plants that look incredible in a showroom and sulk the moment they’re outside in the English winter.
The honest version of expertise isn’t certificates. It’s years of getting it wrong, correcting it, and building up the kind of knowledge that’s actually useful to someone standing in their garden wondering what to do next.
Hillcroft Gardens exists because friends and neighbours kept asking Donna to help with their gardens, and she realised there was a gap in the market that nobody was filling well. Not the man-and-van gardener who mows and moves on. Not the high-end design firm that charges £3,000 before they’ve looked at a plant. Something in between — expert, honest, and genuinely invested in how your garden turns out.
That’s what Hillcroft is. And that’s who Donna is.