Chelsea Flower Show 2012 - the show gardens

The show gardens are one of the most popular attractions at Chelsea. They are often too expensive and sometimes too crazy for many people to relate to but I felt that this year there were some lovely ideas in the main gardens particularly planting schemes.

The first show garden on my little tour was one which had some relevance for me. It was the Arthritis Research UK garden designed by Thomas Hoblyn. I work at the University of Manchester doing research on the genetic basis of arthritis in a unit funded by Arthritis Research UK. The charity has recently rebranded, formerly the Arthritis Research campaign (ARC), and has just celebrated its 75th anniversary and this is its first sponsored garden at Chelsea. This is the second garden which is inspired by Italian Renaissance gardens, more specifically the Villa D'Este and Villa Lante.

It has three water features, a water cascade at the back of the garden, a shallow mirror pool with two step paths across it and a long fountain seat similar to one at the Villa Lante. There are 5 impressive Italian cypress trees, the planting is very Mediterranean with lots of silver foliage, some bright red poppies and some statuesque globe artichoke. Many of the herbs were grown by Jekka McVicar's nurseries. One link to arthritis is the use of Borage, whose seed oil can be used to ease the symptoms of arthritis.
The World Vision garden represents the ripple effect of the child sponsorship, affecting not only the child, but his parents and the whole community. At the heart of the garden is a ripple pool which is reached by a labyrinthine path, which is punctuated by tree ferns.

The main sponsors of the Chelsea Flower Show, M&G, had their garden designed by Andy Sturgeon. It is a modern take on the Arts and Crafts movement. The main feature of the garden is a copper ring wave sculpture and there is some nice clipped topiary made from Ilex rather than box. That is Toby Buckland spoiling my picture!

Next is one of my favourite gardens, designed by Arne Maynard, this is the Laurent-Perrier Bicentenary garden. A very elegant garden with the most gorgeous planting.

The planting is very romantic of pale pinks, purple, greys and white. I love the way he has the roses trained over a hazel wigwam. He's also famous for using copper beech in his garden designs and this garden is no exception with a lovely pleached copper beech hedge.

The plants were grown by the online garden centre Crocus and included Papaver somniferum, Sweet Rocket, Persicaria bistorta and Salvia x sylvestris 'Rose Queen'. Part formal garden with informal planting.
The next garden featured the first caravan in a garden at Chelsea. Jo Thompson introduced us to her little vintage caravan called Doris!

The planting mainly blue and white.

Sarah Price's garden is another garden inspired by the natural landscape, most particularly limestone pavements. The planting looked very nice in the early evening light.

Nigel Dunnett always designs thought-provoking gardens and this year he has gone for a more formal design, the focal point is a stone-roofed shelter, it is designed so that rainwater drains through the meadows at the side of the garden into linear bioswale drainage courses. The planting is meadow-like featuring different colours of the Lilium martagon (Turk's cap lily).

Another garden inspired by the countryside, by Adam Frost, this time highlighting the fenland landscape and the poet John Clare. There is an oak-framed shelter and a cool shady area at the back of the garden which opens out into paths, wild planting and a large rill which you can cross using stepping stones. I love the blue and yellow planting combination.

Now to the garden which got talked about the most and you couldn't miss it as you walked round the grounds. Diarmuid Gavin's garden, if you can call it that. I can see what he was trying to do which was to show that you can garden in small places on different levels. But for the Chelsea visitor you only saw the outside, only selected people could really see the garden properly so I think the message was lost.

 Chris Beardshaw was convinced that his "unfashionable" garden wouldn't win a gold medal, but he was proved wrong with his Furzey Garden. This was inspired by the said garden in the New Forest and was built with the help of students working in the gardens, part of the Minstead Training project which provides a wide range of services for people with learning disabilities. It is a woodland garden, with lots of rhododendrons, azaleas and other acid-loving plants. Though not my sort of garden, the planting was lovely and was a wellbuilt garden.

Another favourite of mine was the L'Occitane Immortelle Garden, recreating a Corsican maquis habitat. The yellow ever-lasting Immortelle flowers are the main focus of the garden and you can smell them as soon as you get near the garden especially in the baking heat that we had that day.

The one garden at the show that really did make you stop and think was the Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden garden. This was created to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Korean conflict. The watch tower and barbed wire highlight the remains of war, but this has been overtaken by nature.

Cleve West has now won best in show in consecutive years with his gardens, this year his Brewin Dolphin garden, like the Arne Maynard garden has a very formal style but with looser planting. This also has beech hedging but also yew topiary and an antique iron gate.

Joe Swift has put off designing a Chelsea garden for many years but finally gave it a go and won a gold medal with a really lovely garden. The Homebase Teenage Cancer Trust garden. The garden is designed around two large cedar wood frames which dictates the colour scheme of warm coppers and gold. This is a refreshing change from the pink and purple colour schemes of many years.

I loved the planting of orange geums, dusky orange verbascums, bronze fennel and brown iris.

The Aussies always do a garden at Chelsea and for me they are often a bit samey, usually based round the garden as a room outdoors.

The final garden is the Rooftop Workplace of Tomorrow which is designed to show a potential rooftop garden in an urban environment to extend the office outdoors. Innovative swing chairs.

 As to my favourite of the show gardens, its a tough one this year, I always like Cleve West's designs, I liked the yellow and blue natural planting of Adam Frost's garden, the Italian inspired Thomas Hoblyn garden and the unusual copper orange planting and features in Joe Swift's garden but I think the one garden that I could see myself living in, or getting ideas from for my own garden, would be Arne Maynard's garden.

Chelsea Flower Show 2012 - The small gardens

Ok so I know the Chelsea Flower show is not everyone's cup of tea, some say its elitist and snobby, some say that its unrealistic for true gardeners and some criticise its environmental credentials. Yes I know all that but how often do you get an event where you can completely immerse yourself in stunning gardens and fabulous flowers. I've been to the flower shows at Hampton Court, Tatton, Southport and Harrogate but for me the quality of the plants and the gardens at Chelsea is just that one notch above. I love to see the plants in peak condition and the new varieties, to smell the roses as well as just see them. The RHS are more and more trying to reuse the gardens in other settings and reduce the carbon footprint.

The weather this year was glorious and the plants seemed to revel in it. I had a half day ticket and it can be very busy when you first get in but I headed for the slightly less popular small gardens first rather than the show gardens and then looked round the show gardens a bit later when it was a bit quieter. The Artisan gardens are situated under the trees (inhabited by squawking parakeets) in Ranelagh gardens. They are so much smaller than how they appear on the TV.

The first garden on the lane was the Plant Explorers garden designed by Scottish Agricultural college.

 It is a garden for a young plant hunter, it has a small outdoor office for planning the trips abroad and a greenhouse for growing the plants on the return. As you'd expect there were lots of unusual plants in this garden. One of the main features are some resin blocks into which is encased some of the treasures found on his travels.

You can spend hours looking at this garden and still not see all the small details. I love the plants growing a very thin layer of soil on the windowsill, as if the gardener just popped them in there for lack of any space. Then there is a lovely green roof.

A lovely detailed garden.
Next was the Welcome to Yorkshire sponsored Bronte's Yorkshire Garden.

The window at the back of the garden evokes the house at Top Withins, supposedly the inspiration behind Wuthering Heights and the bridge is similar to the one on the walk to Bronte Falls near Haworth, where the Bronte sisters lived. A simple garden with mostly natural, wild planting of grasses, ferns and heather with a lovely Silver Birch in the centre. This garden got a gold medal and won the peoples award for their favourite small garden.
A garden created by a Slovenian designer was next called Pepa's Story. It contains a shepherds hut built from limestone, with a fireplace and again naturalistic planting. The planting is characteristic of the Karst area of Slovenia.

The vital work carried out by WaterAid is highlighted in the next garden.
The hut is actually a composting latrine.

Another garden dealing with water issues is the Naturally Dry garden, a William Wordsworth-inspired garden. It is said to be a garden set in the South-East of England but is inspired by gardens from Cumbria, a county which doesn't suffer from a shortage of rain! It gives ideas and inspiration on drought tolerant planting and how to capture water for use in the garden.

More naturalistic planting but some nice details like the ivy-leaved toadflax in the cracks in the wall. Some nice ideas here, the stone well collects rain water and run off from the roof of the stone building. The bare soil is mulched with gravel which prevents evaporation but also allows rain to run through it. Then the designer has chosen a host of drought tolerant plants, fennel, Salvias, foxgloves, aromatic foliage plants and grasses.

One of two gardens at this year's Chelsea inspired by the Italian renaissance gardens, but this time on a small scale. The ACPO Garden is an "outdoor space designed for contemplation and communication", well it was a garden that actually looked like a garden and not a scene from the countryside, so I liked it. It had a raised planting area with seats round it. Boosted by vibrant planting of foxgloves and I think my plant of the show, the Geum, a few varieties including 'Totally Tangerine' and 'Marmalade', it was backed by a lovely hedge of Thuja occidentalis 'Smaragd' and had a gorgeous Acer grisum in the corner.

The Thuja was used again to create the topiary columns.
Another literary-inspired garden was next, this time Thomas Hardy and the beautiful Dorset countryside. The Planksbridge Shepherd's Hut garden was like a scene from 'Far from the Madding Crowd'. It was a very relaxing space. I loved the hut and the small vegetables grown around it, how about the shepherd's crook climbing frame for the beans, lovely.

The Artisan Garden which won best in show was next.
Called Satoyama Life, it is a garden designed to show the importance of living in harmony with nature.

This is not the sort of garden I'd like myself but I love this garden, the green makes it so calming, the Japanese elements are lovely, but most of all I love the green mossy shed, I would like that. The round shapes are repeated through the garden in not just the mossy shed but on the pebbles in the path steps and also the pebbles on the wall.
So that is the Artisan gardens, which are usually my favourite gardens but I think I prefer some of the show gardens as many of these Artisan gardens this year were more naturalistic wild gardens, countryside settings rather than real gardens and so less inspiring for my own garden.
Another set of small gardens have been given a new name this year, they are called the Fresh gardens and these had no fixed brief and were supposed to be innovative and creative. These are the gardens that get people talking and are not to every bodies taste. Some of the talking points were blue string, QR codes, artificial grass and an exercise bike which powers your water features.
There you go and here are some pictures.

Hmmm.......
I did like the Bradstone Panache Garden though. Vibrant planting (again lots of Geums), but also aquilegias and foxgloves. Very colourful.

So that completes my tour of the small gardens and describe the show gardens in my next post!