Sylvia Crowe

Dame Sylvia Crowe, DBE (15 September 1901 – 30 June 1997) was an English landscape architect and garden designer.

Born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, but spent her childhood in Felbridge, Sussex, and trained under Madeline Agar at Swanley College (later absorbed into Hadlow College, which continues to teach University of Greenwich courses in garden design). She was President of the Institute of Landscape Architects (later the Landscape Institute) from 1957 to 1959 and made important contributions to landscape planning for new towns, roads, forestry and the landscape of power. Among her notable projects is the roof garden for the Scottish Widows building in Edinburgh, implemented using native Scottish plants.

In the mid-20th century Lower Soughton Hall at Northop in Flintshire belonged to the Gray family. In 1972, Stephen Alexander Reith Gray was Flintshire High Sheriff and Chief Executive of Shotton Steelworks. He commissioned Crowe and Raymond Cutbush to redesign the gardens and they remain much as they look today, with formal and informal features which includes herbaceous borders, yew hedges and island beds with mixed planting.

Crowe received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1977.

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