Chelsea - Diarmuid Gavin's Irish Sky Garden

Hard to resist those box cushions stepping into the distance contrasting with shaggy hakonechloa and dripping birch

intriguing corten paths but you can't not see the crane

Imperata rubra picking up corten red

It's not easy to enjoy this garden from the viewpoints you're allowed as a visitor. You can't begin to get an idea of the overall shape. Also, I feel uneasy with the extravagant imported topiarised trees and box plants.  The key plants are ones that became design staples during the noughties (Miscanthus, Calamagrostis 'Carl Foerster', Hornbeam, Hakonechloa), but they don't feel tired as they make a study in contrasting form and texture. Nice. I really want to go up that path.

Herbaceous perennials in Winter

Metallic shades of ghosts of plants in the low winter sun.
Echinacea, copper in foreground
Perovskia 'Blue Spire' irridescent white like magnesium in upright bunch far left (great blue flower spikes in summer)
Eryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott's Ghost' spiky silver to the right
Phlomis bronze button seedheads, back left
Spun gold of dried grass (battered Calamagrostis?), back right
Piet Oudolf borders at RHS Wisley.

Garden Barge Square - garden on the Thames

This is a house boat community on the Thames, not half a mile from Tower Bridge. The Dutch barges have been planted for the exposed conditions using deep containers. There is a unified planting scheme including light trees (Robinia pseudacacia, Birch and apple varieties) grasses, shrubs and annuals.

This is a really exciting garden. You enter the wharf through a tiny portal in a wall, and then there is this whole other world below you, down a gangplank shifting in the river swell. What's a garden doing here, fruit and roses, so close to the City?! This is the area where spices, tea and other goods from the east were docked. There's a sense of dark history and transgression, even on a gloriously sunny mid-summer day.

Please follow the link and click on the slideshow icon top left in the toolbar. You can regulate the pace of the slideshow yourself and turn on or off the comments.
http://picasaweb.google.com/Vivekagarden/DropBox?authkey=Gv1sRgCOLhz4_9-YGO9QE&feat=directlink

Unfortunately this garden is open to the public only once a year, so bookmark this link and put it in your diary for next summer http://www.opensquares.org/

Dreamtime

The iridescence of these peony petals is fascinating. The planting here with its moody colours, the mix of shiny and feathery, and of rounded and spiky is absorbing. The sharp geometry of the evergreens and hard landscaping create the feeling of a dream.

Chelsea Gold-winning garden:
Paeonia 'Buckeye Belle'
Iris 'Black Swan'
Deschampsia cespitosa (grass mid-left)
Foeniculum vulgare 'Giant Bronze' (fennel)
Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna' (blue spikes to the front)
Astrantia major (buttons of flowers to right and bottom left)
Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster' (grass in a row at the back)

In a real garden you would need to add a range of plants to have colour beyond May. The calamagrostis, or arrow grass, has particularly good year-round value, with upright flower heads and a height of 1.8m in late summer. It retains good form when dead and buff coloured, only needing shearing down in February. From now on it has lovely movement in the breeze and soft whispering (the designer has located a seat behind it).

See the garden more fully and hear the designer, Luciano Giubbilei, talk about the interrelation of the different elements http://www.bbc.co.uk/chelsea/show_gardens/laurent.shtml