Sarah Eberle and the Imposter Syndrome Behind Her Success

Designing a show garden for RHS Chelsea is notoriously gruelling. Many a designer has finished the week physically and emotionally exhausted, whether clutching a Gold Medal or wondering what more they could have done. 

This year, Sarah Eberle won her 14th Chelsea gold medal and 4th Best in Show, more than any other designer in the show’s history. She has since been awarded an MBE for services to horticulture and garden design in the King’s Birthday Honours.

When we meet a few days after her Chelsea triumph, she is neither lying in a darkened room nor on holiday celebrating her achievements. She is at her desk in a Portakabin at the centre of a muddy building site in a remote corner of Oxfordshire: more hard hats and steel-capped boots than champagne and engraved glass trophies. She is already planning her next Chelsea showstopper. She is also in the middle of moving house.

Her “On the Edge” Garden, designed for the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, was lauded for its layered, naturalistic planting, which evoked a garden emerging on the edge of an urban landscape. It played on the interconnection between a garden and its landscape context, which is a significant feature of Sarah’s work.

But amid all the praise being heaped on her, Sarah remains firmly grounded. “People ask me how I’ve reached the level I’ve reached, and I will say it’s because I just kept going. It doesn’t mean I was good at the start, nobody is. I’ve learned to be good at it.”

Now she has reached the top, what is it that is driving her on at an age - she turns 70 this year - when many people are looking to wind down?

Sarah believes she has ADHD, although she has never been formally diagnosed. “I can’t do boring things. I have to have that dopamine all the time, so Chelsea suits me because I need excitement. My way of getting excitement is doing creative things that are new and different and challenge me. That sends my dopamine level really sky high.”

She also puts another trait, the ability to hyperfocus, on her ADHD. “I can put a pile of books by that door to take them home, and I could leave them there for seven days and not even notice them. If I’m at Chelsea, that’s it. Forget it. No phone calls, no emails. There’s a tradition at Chelsea that people go off to the Rose and Crown pub: as far as I’m concerned you must be joking, I am staying here.”

That intense focus may also explain how her garden was finished 5 days before the judging. It had to be, to make sure the naturalistic planting had time to settle itself - Sarah deliberately used small plants to achieve the look of effortless wild-sown planting, but she stresses again, with 50 years in the business and 20 years after her first Chelsea show garden, she has notched up a lot of experience.

The ADHD also means she has a fastidious eye for detail. A rock placed 50 mm out of line has to be moved. “People go, why are you bothering, most people won’t notice? I notice. And people will notice, their brains read this as correct. The brain is clever.”

Perhaps even more surprising is Sarah’s revelation that she is driven by imposter syndrome. It is hard to imagine how anyone with a total of 20 RHS Gold Medals could feel unworthy. “Even at Chelsea, people will go “hi!”, and I think, they can’t possibly be talking to me, and my daughters tell me I’ve just ignored someone. It just drives me harder and harder and harder to succeed. That’s all. Prove myself.”

We touch on the fact that even this year, only two of the nine large show gardens on Main Avenue were designed by women. Sarah says it is not that the industry is sexist, but it’s the same reason that fewer women are head chefs or at the top of any profession.

The most time Sarah took off after having her three children was nine days. Then she would just cart them about on jobs and when children were banned from shows, she smuggled them in under blankets to help with painting and planting.

It was tough, and in her early career there was more prejudice against working mothers. On the other hand, she feels clients are more ready to open up to a woman, and says no one should underestimate the importance of the designer/client relationship.

“The psychology of design is one of my favourite and most interesting things about the process. Keying into the client’s brain and then being given the trust and freedom to do what I need to.”

During an initial meeting with one client, he was adamant he wanted to build a tennis court bang in the middle of a wonderful view. Sarah knew it would turn into an eyesore. She tapped into his psychology, told him it was a bad investment, and the tennis court was scrapped.

“I sometimes say to clients: ‘Do you want me to be nice? Or do you want me to be honest?’ I always want to be honest with clients. Always.”

Away from the drawing board, rather than jostling for position on the celebrity designer circuit, Sarah gets satisfaction developing the next generation of talent. As well as tutoring at the English Gardening School, she has lectured around the world and is committed to mentoring and teaching.

“When you’ve got a class of people who are eager and interested then it’s a privilege to help them on their journey. I’m passionate about what I do - as anyone who’s been in one of my lectures knows. I love talking about it.”

She is keen to pass on her message that hard work brings rewards. “Success is about perseverance, grit and endurance. All of which are good predictors of long term achievement. In other words - don’t give up!”

She is sceptical about the use of computers in garden design.

“Even now you cannot design on a computer. You can draw a garden up, brilliant, great, but you can’t actually design on it in the first place,” she said. She trained herself to use CAD, but it brought on migraines, so instead she relies on paper and pencil and leaves it to other people to digitalise her designs.

As well as designing by hand, Sarah has trained her eye to measure distances, which means she is able to sketch out a garden on site. Too many designers are too quick to get back to the drawing board instead of spending the time absorbing the atmosphere of a place, she believes. She doesn’t leave the site until she has a complete plan of how she is going to transform it.

She honed this skill during the 1980s when she would offer clients a two-hour design consultation for £150. Using a notebook with carbon paper, she would sketch out her proposals for the garden, rip it out and leave it with them at the end.

Clients from that period still come up to her at Chelsea and say they went ahead and built that garden, exactly as she had planned it.

She still has copies of those notebooks, and they could end up featuring in one of several books Sarah would like to publish.

Until then, there are more show gardens to design and more clients to advise.

“I’m still learning. You have to learn and keep learning. If you ever stop learning, you should stop being in this business.”

• The difference between a good garden and a great garden is how it makes you feel.

• Planting makes you emotional, the design makes you comfortable. A great garden needs both, so if you are weaker in one area, you need to get stronger.

• You must be honest with clients. There’s no point being nice, you need to be honest - that’s the way to get their trust.

• Train your eye. I used to walk into a garden and estimate the measurements, lengths, levels etc and then measure them accurately.

• You can’t design on a computer. You can draw up a garden on a computer, but you can’t design it.

• Don’t leave site without a plan. I never walk away without knowing what I’m going to do.

• Commitment matters more than talent. Nobody is good at this at the start.