From an early age, Alys Fowler was smitten by her mother's gardening talents and the degree of self-sufficiency it afforded the family. After leaving school in 1996, Fowler studied at the Royal Horticultural Society, and the world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. Even while studying in the epicentre of the British gardening establishment, it was clear Fowler had an early interest in loosening the confines of contemporary landscape gardening to include a more organic and accessible aesthetic. Fowler's superiors were quick to recognise her talent and passion. In 1998, she was awarded a Smithsonian Scholarship to study at the New York Botanical Gardens based in the Bronx.

Fowler moved to New York in 1998 to complete her apprenticeship. Driven by the ultra-urban environment, she was forced to find new ways of experiencing and creating green space. Fowler maximised her apartment's fire escape by growing plants and vegetables, and she quickly found a community making gardens in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Exposure to their collective ability to create beautiful and inviting gardens out of objects found in New York's streets and dumpsters chimed with her existing interest in accessible gardening. This became a highly influential period of her training, and spawned the idea for her first book in 2007, The Thrifty Gardener.

Fowler returned to the UK in 1999. Following her interest in grass-roots environmental work, she attended the University College London to complete a Master's in Society, Science, and the Environment. Continuing her passion to fuse traditional gardening with modern eco-friendly culture, Fowler focused her work at this time on the benefits that allotments bring to the environment and those who work on them.

Fowler lives in Birmingham with her artist husband, Holiday.