Gardener's world
A preview of the best of this year's Chelsea Flower Show
Above: Arabella Lennox-Boyd
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH GARDEN
The doyenne of landscape design, Arabella Lennox-Boyd, is returning to Chelsea after an eight-year break as the designer of The Daily Telegraph garden. The multi-award winning Lennox-Boyd says she didn’t mean to take such a long break ‘it just happened’ but she’s excited about returning to Chelsea as ‘it’s an opportunity to do something that you really want to do. You get a freehand, that’s why I’ve come back really, because I had an idea I wanted to execute.’
Her idea is to create a very simple garden, inspired by the purity and restraint of Japanese garden design. It is a true true statement garden; a marked break from the busy planting of previous Chelsea Flower Shows. Lennox-Boyd says, ‘I try to keep my garden as simple as possible, it is quite single-minded. I look at the space as one space, not as a series of spaces. I don’t want too many plants or ideas crammed into it.’
Much of the garden will be water, hard elements have been reduced to a minimum while restrained planting and water come to the fore, encouraging light and contemplation. A stone-edged rectangular pool fills the space of the garden and is softened by planting on two sides. A serpentine path of stone, crossed by ribbons of white water lilies, links the front of the garden to the planting at the back, leading the eye towards a bamboo thicket. and precision are key to the planting design. Large leaves and grey foliage, falling roses and rounded shrubs all create a rhythm reflected in the stillness of the water. Lennox-Boyd says she enjoyed designing for such a small space as she usually works on far bigger area.
THE CADOGAN GARDEN
Robert Myers says it is ‘very exciting’ to be returning to Chelsea this year with a design for Cadogan Estates. A Chelsea regular (he did the Fortnum & Mason garden last year), Myers designed the Cadogan garden in 2003 when it celebrated the 250th anniversary of the death of Sir Hans Sloane. Myers has a long association with landowners Cadogan, having worked with the Estate on all three phases of the Duke of York’s development, due to complete later this year with the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery. ‘The idea for this year’s garden at Chelsea,’ says Myers, ‘is inspired by what a London courtyard garden might look like in a warmer future.’ So a traditional London garden – with sunny lawns and flower-filled borders – has ‘evolved into a garden of shade, lush planting and cooling water canals’, says Myers. To give shade and structure, a double canopy of trees will be created, with a high canopy of palms overlapping the centre of the garden with a second canopy of smaller trees below. The planting is ‘ornamental and designed mainly for semi-shade, with a proportion of evergreens for year-round use,’ says Myers. Ideas about ‘green architecture and water recycling’ are also alluded to in the design. Myers says the garden isn’t all about the future, as with many ‘Cadogan projects, we have tried to bring elements of this history through in the design’. In this garden Sir Hans Sloane provides a link with the past. At the rear of the garden a space will be used for informal seating, paved with sawn York stone slabs, and to one side of the terrace will be a statue of the founder of the Cadogan Estate.
THE DAYLESFORD ORGANIC GARDEN
Daylesford Organic has become a by-word for chic organic eating with its chain of farm shops and cafes and, at Chelsea, Carole Bamford’s company is aiming to firmly establish its pioneering, eco-friendly credentials.
The garden is an organic agrarian garden; a green wheat field flanked by native trees and wetland ditching, to a sheltered potager. It will be created entirely by sustainable gardening practices and intends to demonstrate that the demands of organic practice can be strengths, not limitations, in contemporary design. Native trees will flank a small field of wheat, bordered by ditching for drainage and wetland flora, and native hedging for wildlife. This leads over a traditionally laid hedge into a kitchen garden, sheltered by stone walls and an outdoor fireplace. The focal point will be architectural green-roofed building with a planted green roof, solar panels, reclaimed timber and Cotswold stone. The garden will boast a number of green credentials; it will be zero waste (there is both a composter and wormery), zero carbon, it uses local materials, local food, sustainable water, maintains natural habitats and uses traditional crafts such as hedge laying. The garden has had the thumbs up from The Soil Association. Director Patrick Holden says: ‘I salute Lady Bamford and her team for the leadership they have shown…. The Daylesford Organic garden is a wonderful demonstration of organic principles.’ Carole Bamford herself says, ‘I hope our garden at Chelsea will inspire people - and especially children - to discover the excitement of gardening and growing their food; of that first tiny green shoot, and the wonderful taste of something just picked from the earth.
THE SAVILLS GARDEN
This is the third year in a row that Philip Nixon has designed the high profile show garden for Savills. For his 2008 Chelsea garden, the Fulham-based designer is taking inspiration from modern art galleries such as the Tate Modern and MOMO in New York to examine the relationship between art and gardening. While preparing his design, Nixon says he wanted to use the rhythm and geometry of the way ‘things are structured in an art gallery’. The result will be ‘quite a formal garden using traditional ideas, such as topiary, in a contemporary way’; a play on the idea of how planting design is done. Clipped hedges will form a ‘frame’, creating a geometric structure and the centre will be quite free from using some perennials but also shrubs. The result, Nixon says, will be ‘like an abstract painting within a frame’ with the formal planting contrasting with the informal.
Nixon says the garden isn’t hard to execute, but as always with Chelsea Flower Show, time constraints are the thing and it is ‘quite hectic’ as the garden has to be created ‘in a ridiculously short amount of time’, with the contractors on site for only two and half weeks before the show opens. Nixon recognises that these hastily created show gardens (that cost from £200,000 to £300,000) a pop are ‘quite fake really, but it’s a nice way to explore ideas’. He also knows that in terms of publicity there’s nothing better. ‘Showing at Chelsea makes a huge difference as to how you are perceived by clients and other designers,’ he says. And, at the end of the day ‘it’s ultimately great fun’, although he admits that right now, in the middle of preparations, ‘it feels like hell’!