Chelsea - hard landscaping design details

A few of my favourite things...

fragile

cor-ten or terracotta?

brimming

hammered finish

Basildon Bond dimensions

Giubbilei granite

Yorkshire - mac screen

cut slate

edgeing pieces

Chelsea - plants and plant combinations

A few of my favourite things...

Geum 'Totally Tangerine'

Anenome 'Wild Swan'

Waterside nursery

Briza media

Kangaroo paw

'shredded' foxglove

boragey blue flowers?

with bean stalk railings

Eremurus

Chelsea - Cleve West's Libya Garden

Inspired by Libyan ruins.  The handmade hatched texture of the concrete columns and the plant palette call up 50s textiles

Who wouldn't want to walk to the bench at the end?  The uneven floor and the steps would ensure you slowed down and thought about where you're going.  A garden's key role is to make you think about where you are going. The whole, aided by a dusty looking mortar and silver-leaved plants, evokes mediterranean heat and having to slow down.
The herbaceous planting focuses on flower head shape: the 'plates' of Achillea taygetea (mustard yellow that fades - very nice and seen a lot this year), globes of allium, domed umbels of Anthriscus and parsnip, spikes of Camassia and Stachys, screens of fennel foliage.  Brightest red buttons of Dianthus cruentas sing out (a new plant for Chelsea; Alan Titchmarsh confused it with D. carthusianorum, which is pink, and which  has been in fashion of late with Nigel Dunnett's take on prairie planting).  You can't have a show garden without a multi-stemmed tree; in this case Sophora japonica, which would have great autumn colour and big sculptural seed pods. 

Some of my pictures were used in Landscape magazine’s July edition, pp38 - 39

there are 5 all together

Sphora japonica, Acanthus mollis 'Rue Ledan'

herbaceous planting

Chelsea - Jihae Hwang's Hae-Woo-So Emptying One's Mind Garden

This garden mesmerises out of all proportion to its size and apparent humbleness. The artist has succeeded in creating a spiritual space with a toilet. Maybe the draw is in its neglected end-of-the-garden-place-to-be-on-your-own feeling. The best in artisan garden award is both annoying (I want this place to be for me alone!) and immensely pleasing (the artist deserves recognition for her talent).
Some of my pictures from Chelsea were used in Landscape magazine’s July edition, pp38 - 39

wash your hands

Jeffersonia diphylla

upturned pot as pillar, rough unglazed base offered to view

Chelsea - Thomas Hoblyn's Cornish Memories Garden

Rhododendron 'Cunningham's Blush'

Approaching this garden the first impact is the beautiful and perfect oval of the pool, and its generous size. The smooth curved channels thrill with their line and with a fast running flow, even if your health and safety head thinks 'plenty of scope here for twisted ankles'. Pines and rhododendrons (here Pinus sylvestris 'Watereri') are very evocative of my Dorset early years so the planting provokes for me the emotion and retro response that the designer was aiming to capture.

who made these lovely bowls?

The rockpool bowls are gorgeous - oxygenating plants in them were producing lots of fascinating bubbles - and pick up on the artisan theme promoted though the show. The pavillion, however, was a little too B&Q for me.  I remain a fan of Hoblyn's Chelsea gardens.

Chelsea - Adam Frost's Frank Lloyd Wright inspired garden

geometry

The geometry is striking: overlapping slabs of very nice polished concrete, a square of box and bespoke seating. You have to step over the water, and to go up and down the levels to make it to the end: this journey creates space.  The trees with their bare stems and 'V' form on top (Zelkova serrata 'Green Vase') are perfectly placed for shade, seclusion and leading on the eye.
Rodgersia is a plant I'd love to use (it needs a moist root run, and borders water) and here its chestnut leaf form perfectly sets off fans of ferns and spikes of foxgloves. The blue geranium at the front of that planting section links to cooling blue and white entrance fronted by more geranium, fine froth of Luzula nivea and upward Iris sibirica.

plant texture

plants for moist condtions