Meet the designers behind the Sightsavers garden at Chelsea

Sarah Fisher

For Sarah, gardening was not the start of her career, but a natural continuation of it. Before retraining in horticulture, she worked as an art therapist with social services and schools.

“For me, making real living connections with other people is what life is about,” she says. That grounding in wellbeing continues to shape her design approach. “We’re not just making a pretty picture. We’re creating a real living space that is meaningful for the person we’re making it for.”

Growing up in North London, Sarah recalls that the outdoors felt distant. “Outside was something you could look at, but we weren’t really allowed to be in it,” she says.

Now, living with her two children in a greener part of the city, she sees access to nature as essential to everyday life. “Going outside is about connecting with other people and connecting with nature. Those two things go together.”

Janice Molyneux

Janice’s path into garden design began from another starting point. Janice trained and worked as a secondary school history teacher, a role she loved for its sense of purpose and community.

After the birth of her second daughter, she took time away from teaching and began to reflect on what mattered most to her. “I thought, what do I really love? And it was being outdoors, nature, gardens,” she says.

Inspired by her mother, an enthusiastic gardener who continues to tend her own garden well into her nineties, Janice enrolled on an introductory garden design course. “Using a different part of my brain was really exciting,” she explains. “You start to notice plants, trees and spaces in a completely new way.”

Ostara Garden Design

Janice began studying horticulture in 2019, around the same time Sarah enrolled at Capel Manor College, where the two met. Sarah and Janice’s shared values and complementary skills led them to found Ostara Garden Design, named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and renewal.

Community has always been central to their work, from school gardens to projects that bring people into closer contact with nature. Their values flow directly into Ostara’s approach to the Sightsavers garden by focusing on plants that engage all the senses, as well as embedding sustainability through permeable surfaces, rainwater capture and wildlife friendly design.

Designing a garden inspired by Sightsavers’ work has also deepened Janice’s thinking around accessibility. “It’s made me think much more consciously about fragrance, texture and how people experience a garden if sight isn’t their primary sense,” she reflects.

Peter Karn

Peter Karn joined the project from a different but complementary design discipline. As the creative director at Barker Langham, his work spans museums, exhibitions and immersive cultural environments.

“The simplest way I describe what I do is that we create spaces that tell stories,” he says. For Peter, strong design balances form, function and communication while creating an emotional response. “You can make something incredibly beautiful or technically impressive, but if people come away from it cold, it isn’t really of value.”

Gardens, he believes, are inherently immersive spaces. “They’re real, living environments. You don’t need to simulate nature. You can actually create it.”

Working alongside Janice and Sarah introduced him to the complexity of ecosystems and planting, offering a new and rewarding way to think about storytelling in physical space.