Chelsea Flower Show vs Chelsea FC
If you heard corks popping in Chelsea this week it was probably not because of the football! Tom Stuart-Smith may have opened a few bottles of fizz (his garden is bank rolled by Laurent Perrier) and with good reason, he now has more gold medals than Sir Steve Redgrave. While many Chelsea fans were heading for Moscow, I was striding along the Chelsea Embankment intent on seeing the best in international horticulture.
Tom’s show winning design features absolutely no colour (apart from green) instead using different textures, shapes and tones of green to create a very peaceful almost dreamy environment. There are also overflowing zinc troughs reflecting the sky and the planting in the darkest black water, this adds to the feeling of serene calm. My favourite element of the garden is the grove of 30-year-old hornbeams pruned so that the foliage forms ‘clouds’ on the branches.
There were other good designs; Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden showed her trademark style of seemingly disorganised romantic planting exercised with incredible control and precision – her pool of water was one of the biggest I have seen at Chelsea and the garden as a whole showed oriental influence almost everywhere. The Cancer Research garden designed by Andy Sturgeon is another example of what a good designer Andy is. He shows a new side to his planting style with a garden that is influenced more by a primeval swamp than an English country garden. Rippling pools are surrounded by tree ferns, irises and grasses with a cutting edge modern circle design on the rear wall. Clare Agnew was unlucky to get a Silver Gilt medal with some great structured and some less formal planting. Cleve West’s Bupa garden also deserved its gold with some beautiful borders and my favourite sculpture at the show, a huge spherical ball of textured concrete.
However there were also misses; the Dairmuid Gavin garden, as usual was embroiled in controversy. To my mind it was a garden of two halves – The back of the garden is a wonderfully mysterious forest of lollipop laurels inter-planted with daisies, ferns and box balls with paths running through to hidden seating areas. The front half however is typical of many of Dairmund’s designs, but now we have seen this planting style with the novelty outsize daisies it seems to have become boring quickly.
The less said about the wooden box in the middle of the garden (described as a café) the better. I am a Dairmuid Gavin fan, I know he can do better and hope he will challenge us anew next year. The worst garden at the show was undoubtedly Paul Cooper’s Simply Italian – homage to Builders Merchants everywhere! The limestone stretched as far as the eye could see with fountains ensuring the said limestone became as slippery as an ice rink. The final insult was planting lime hating rhododendrons in – yes; you guessed it, limestone planters!
Check out the Chelsea Flower Show for yourself at: www.rhs.org.uk/chelsea/2008/
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