Ann-Marie’s life was built around Jules Powell; he wasn’t just a side character. She has written in very clear language that he quit his job to raise their two sons while she built her design business, worked in TV, and wrote books. That is the kind of arrangement that either makes or breaks a marriage in a quiet way.
It seems to have deepened something very important in the Powells’ case. When Ann-Marie talks about Jules, she doesn’t use the usual platitudes that people use when they are sad. She calls him an “elegant emperor” and a “graceful, kind presence.” They sound very clear. Earned.
The cancer diagnosis brought gardening and illness together in a way that no one expected. Ann-Marie had planned a Macmillan Cancer Support Legacy Garden at RHS Hampton Court in 2015, which was a long time before she got cancer herself. Now that we look back at it, that detail is quietly heartbreaking. It had been years since she had thought about gardens as healing places. She just hadn’t needed one for herself in this way yet.
On October 21, 2025, Jules passed away. Ann-Marie’s post was short, honest, and notable for what it didn’t do: it wasn’t a neat way to deal with grief. She just wrote, “The house echoes.” „The garden doesn’t feel whole. “Everything does.” Anyone who has read her work before would find that last line unbearable. In her writings, Ann-Marie Powell has always said that gardens are places where everything fits together. It was more honest for her to say that her own now didn’t feel that way than most public statements of loss.
What came next over the next six months was harder to put into a single category. Six months after Jules died, in April 2026, she wrote on her Substack about a change. It wasn’t exactly a shift toward comfort, but toward a different understanding of what his love had been.
The supports he made for the sweet peas were still there. He had put plants in certain places, and they were still growing there. The climbers he taught were still going up. One way to look at this is as normal grief taking hold, with the small physical remains of a person giving people something to think about. Ann-Marie, on the other hand, seemed to be talking about something else: realizing that his love wasn’t past tense just because he was.
That’s not an easy thing to say without sounding vague. It wasn’t made vague by her. She made it plant-based. She made it specific to an apple tree they planted for their sons, a border they took care of together, and the exact texture of a garden they worked on together for more than twenty years. It’s likely that the specificity is what makes it land. Gardens, not like most things, keep their proof.
In her public writing, she has been careful not to make it look like she has solved something. In a piece she wrote for the Telegraph four months after Jules died, she talked about having “that same flat feeling” every morning. It seemed like the Instagram posts from the weeks after he died were very still. She wasn’t telling a recovery story. She was telling an ongoing story.
When you look at this from the outside, it’s amazing how the work has held up. After studying landscapes around the world and getting a distinction in NCH Garden Design and Hard Landscape Studies, Ann-Marie Powell started her own business in 1999. Jules held the domestic world in place for more than twenty years, which helped make the business possible. The business is still going. She built an Instagram group that is still there. And the garden, their garden, is still growing, with the plants he chose and the corners he shaped still showing.
Before he died, Jules Powell told her it would be hard but that she would be okay. From what she wrote, it sounds like something someone says when they know exactly what they want from the person they’re leaving. Ann-Marie said in writing that she believed him, not to feel better, but to learn. There’s a change. She looks like she fully gets it.
FAQs
Q1: What illness did Ann-Marie Powell’s husband Jules die from?
Jules Powell died from cancer in October 2025.
Q2: Who is Ann-Marie Powell?
She is a British award-winning garden designer, TV presenter, and author.
Q3: How did Ann-Marie Powell cope after Jules died?
She found solace in the garden they built together over two decades.
Q4: Did Jules Powell support Ann-Marie’s career?
Yes, he gave up his own career to raise their two sons.
Q5: Where was Jules Powell laid to rest?
Beneath a Scots Pine at Greenacres Living Memorial Park in Grayshott, Hampshire.