Showing posts with label water feature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water feature. Show all posts

Saturday, 28 May 2011

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 - 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