When Dean Charlton was a boy, he used to scavenge his father’s leftover plants and repot them to sell at the end of his drive to make some pocket money for himself and his sister. This early entrepreneurship may well have set him on the path for his future career. A year ago, he opened Hooton’s Walled Nursery near his South Yorkshire home town of Rotherham, in partnership with his father Glenn (who clearly did not begrudge his son’s opportunistic pilfering of his marigolds back in the early 1990s) and with extra help from various other members of his close-knit family.

Dean came to horticulture via a degree in Fine Art at Northumbria University in Newcastle. He had grown up with many members of his extended family gardening around him, so it was something that felt entirely natural, as much as art and gardens seemed to him to be intrinsically linked. After he graduated, he went to work on a community farm and then spent two years studying horticulture at Newcastle College. There, his tutor Tony Milan talked a lot about the late gardener Christopher Lloyd, which led to Dean reading Christopher’s books, and learning about Great Dixter and the East Sussex garden’s student training programme. Intrigued and inspired by this, Dean applied for a traineeship and found himself on a waiting list for more than a year before finally being invited to complete a six-week placement.

Following his first enlightening period there, he spent six months in Essex at the Beth Chatto Gardens, before returning to Great Dixter to work with the head gardener Fergus Garrett. Dean ended up spending three years at the garden and then a further three in its nursery. ‘I fell in love with Dixter; it was completely immersive,’ he says. ‘The time there was priceless – it was such a melting pot of ideas and knowledge, with so many different people coming through.’

Alongside his work at Great Dixter and the Beth Chatto Gardens, Dean continued his artistic pursuits, specialising in linocut prints of plants and the gardens he worked in (which he still sells in his Etsy shop). But after six years at Dixter, he knew it was time to make a move: ‘You can’t stay there forever, it’s not what Fergus wants. He likes people to move on and take their skills with them to make room for the next cohort. It was always my intention to come back home to Rotherham. No offence to the south, but it’s saturated with gardens and nurseries, and I wanted to bring my expertise back to this region, where it is needed more.’

So, in 2023, Dean moved back up north and he put in a proposal to take over a derelict four-acre walled garden and nursery in the village of Hooton Roberts, near Rotherham. Part of the Fitzwilliam Wentworth Estate, the walled garden dates from the mid 1700s and various nurseries selling mainly bedding plants had operated there from the 1950s onwards. The estate manager was immediately convinced by Dean’s passionate pitch, which emphasised the conservation and ecology of the site, as well as his intention to resurrect and teach traditional horticultural techniques and skills.