Award Winning Gardens That Are Built To Last
Let’s take a look at this year’s APL Award Winning Gardens and discover what makes the APL awards relevant to anyone planning on buying a garden.
The APL Awards is an annual event. At a glittering ceremony with celebrity hosts, we celebrate our members’ work and achievements. To anyone looking to buy a garden, the awards may appear to be another version of a high profile flower show. However, the outdoor spaces celebrated at this awards ceremony have something rather special about them. They are all permanent installations built for real people.
Just as it happens at RHS or local garden shows, we ask independent industry experts to scrutinise and rank beautiful gardens on merits such as design, installation, maintenance, overall appearance and environmental credentials. However there is one huge difference. All of the entries are real gardens. None of these outdoor spaces have been created specifically for a show. Each APL award entry is a garden that has been built to last.
All of the APL Award winning gardens since the organisations’ inception in 1995 have been created to enhance the lives of real people. They represent investments that will become long lasting legacies for generations to come. They are neither sponsored commercially nor created to promote a cause. These are purely for pleasure. You probably won’t see these award winning gardens talked about on telly, yet the work that goes into them is incredibly skilled and requires knowledge, craftsmanship and a passion for building beautiful spaces for other people to enjoy.
Why Does The APL Hold An Annual Awards Ceremony?
Every year, our judges travel thousands of miles visiting the hundreds of private gardens that have been nominated for APL awards. They go equipped with intimate knowledge of industry best practice, a raft of measuring and testing tools and an eye for design. The APL Judging panel will interview the garden owners to discover how they feel about the services they received from APL members and the quality of the finished garden. There is a lot of time and tension involved in selecting the award winning gardens as well as a great deal of time spent in organising the award ceremony itself.
So why do we do it?
Firstly, we want to celebrate the diverse range of talents across our membership. APL members can be found all over the UK working with soil, stone, timber and innumerable other materials to create original, unique and beautiful spaces.
Members who walk away with coveted APL medals will always be able to promote themselves as builders of award winning gardens. And in a competitive marketplace, that will help discerning clients to choose the best professionals for their projects.
The morale boost that comes with being involved in the creation of an award winning garden is a big bonus for everybody on the team. From the garden designer to the suppliers, apprentices to team leaders, the sense of pride is tangible and often leads to career advancements.
For anyone planning a garden makeover, taking the time to find out about APL award winning gardens is a good way to gauge what they can expect to pay for high quality landscaping.
Finally, the awards ceremony is an incredible networking experience. Everybody joins in with congratulating and celebrating the winning gardens. The atmosphere is amazing and we’re told that seeing all of those garden images on a big screen often inspires future competition entries.
Judging Criteria For The APL Awards
No two entries for the APL Awards are even remotely similar, let alone the same. Which lends an extra layer of challenges for our judges. Unlike Crufts where the dogs are expected to conform to a breed standard, we need to find different ways to decide which garden should win the award.
There are 19 categories for awards. The majority of categories are based around price brackets, whilst others look at design, maintenance and specific features.
Medals are awarded according to a points system. The judges assume that every garden they visit is a gold medal winner, but on closer scrutiny they may deduct points for faults on finish or other aesthetic. There may be (and there often is) more than one gold, silver merit, silver or bronze winner in each category but there can only be one overall supreme winner.
Will Your Garden Makeover Qualify For An APL Award?
Imagine how proud you would feel if the investment you put into your garden led to your outdoor space winning an award. What would that accolade do to the value of your property? Could you visualise pictures of your garden in the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine?
The first step towards achieving an APL award winning garden, is to commission the design from one of our MAPL garden designers and then hire an APL landscaper to build it for you. Sounds simple? That’s because it is.
APL Supreme Winner 2025
Garden Designed and Built by :-
Ellicar Natural Swimming Pools and Garden Landscapes
Click here to find an APL accredited landscape professional near you.
https://www.landscaper.org.uk/find-a-landscaping-professional/landscaper-directory
Discover more about our fantastic 2024 award winning gardens.
https://hta.org.uk/hta-current-events/apl-awards/apl-award-winners