Sally Festing grew up in Cambridge during the war. After taking a degree in horticulture at Wye College, she lived with her husband  in the US, working as a private secretary, in nursery gardens, and selling cosmetics on a university campus while bringing up a young family.

In England again, teaching gave way to writing - widespread journalism, poetry, radio plays, reviews, and five books, of which two art biographies went into Penguin paperback. Skipping the boundaries between art and science, she has written academic garden history, a series of profiles for the New Scientist, and ten years worth of articles for Times Ed. and Higher Ed. Supplements.

Since childhood she has spent time on the North Norfolk coast. It could have been exposure to its sky-swept coast that fostered an impulse to explore the links between man, art and landscape.

During a long spell on the Leicester/Rutland borders she completed an MA in Creative Writing. Since moving to Essex in 2007 she writes, reads, gardens, sails, listens to the radio and sloshes through sand and mud at Overy Staithe. Chairmanship of Leicester Poetry Society gave way to a Poetry Society Stanza, and latterly to Saltmarsh Poetry in the Burnhams with Cecilia Evans.

Her first garden was a plant- intensive creation in South London,  two essentially design-conscious creations that followed are offset by a cottagy gardenesque one in Norfolk.

Manningtree

 Hallaton

Overy Staithe