A man from Chalford who initiated a festival celebrating “England’s greatest gardener” is receiving an honour from the Queen.

“It was like pushing a snowball down a hill - it just exploded away from me,” said John Lindskog Phibbs, a landscape architect who is receiving an MBE for his work setting up the Capability Brown Festival.

“I feel very honoured. I assumed it was a joke when I received the letter from the cabinet office, but as I started reading I quickly became thunderstruck.”

John initiated the first national Capability Brown Festival in 2016 with an article in the Financial Times.

His article blew up, leading him to work with organisations like the National Trust to find a a way to celebrate the landscape architect’s legacy, which includes designing over 170 parks with many still enduring today.

The festival was the first of its kind and coincided with Capability Brown’s 300th birthday.

The audience reach of press coverage for the festival was estimated to be over 400,000,000 people.

Now, for having spawned a host of new initiatives and partnerships at local level, generating huge interest in the UK’s landscape heritage, John’s work is being recognised for its lasting conservation benefits as well as for its promotion of garden history as an academic subject.

John is also a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow for his Brown research in Russia and northern Europe.