Jill Billington qualified at Reading University with a BA Hons in Fine Art (Sculpture). Subsequently she changed direction and became a garden designer thirty years ago and is now a Fellow of the Society of Garden Designers. Her practice has included small and large domestic gardens in UK and abroad and she has won awards at the Chelsea Flower Show, for the Sunday Times and Scottish National Trust, for Floreales D'Angers in France and for a Garden Festival at Les Jardins de Metis in Quebec.

She has written 8 books, run workshops and given lectures for various colleges, universities and private schools of design. She has also given open lectures for various institutions such as the Royal Horticultural Society, the Friends of Edinburgh Botanic Garden and Oxford Botanic Garden, the National Trust, the Dublin GLDA, and American APLD Conferences at Kew and at conferences in Victoria, British Columbia, in Vancouver and in Seattle.

Over the years, she has taught abroad at the English Garden School, Epicentro, Santiago di Chile and for Pampa Infinita School of Garden Design, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

For 10 years Jill Billington was a member of the Chelsea Gardens Panel for the Royal Horticultural Society and is a judge of show gardens designed and built for all the main RHS Shows such as Chelsea and Hampton Court. She has also been involved with judging gardens for newspapers such as the Times and the Daily Mail.

She has done interviews for BBC television and radio such as Gardener’s World, the World Service, Talk Radio, ‘Woman’s Hour’ and some local radio stations as well as for Stroluch PBS in USA and Asahi TV in Japan.