Chelsea Flower Show 2010

About a week ago today, I was in the early morning lineup to the one-and-only Chelsea Flower Show. Chelsea is a big deal around here, and having first attended last spring, this time around I knew that for the best viewing – sans enormous crowds – you must be there when the gates open. Any outsider seeing the early morning lineup could have easily confused the feisty old gardening ladies jostling for position for teenage girls waiting to see their latest pop idol. Security guards repeatedly warned us “not to surge” and “proceed slowly and calmly” once the gates opened.

Like most, the highlight of Chelsea for me is the large show gardens. Designing a Chelsea garden must be one of the most demanding artistic endeavors imaginable, not to mention a logistical nightmare. And of course it’s also a pricey undertaking - one exhibitor told us the average price tag of each large show garden is around 3.5 million pounds!

You can find all of the information about the show gardens (and more) on the Chelsea site, but here are some of my highlights from my 9 hour marathon visit.

M&G Garden by Roger Platts
A very traditional cottage garden with some of the most amazing planting I have ever seen. Given that cottage gardens have been done a lot, it's quite remarkable to still be able to wow an audience with one. If you were actually allowed into the garden, I could have spent hours sitting in this one.







Daily Telegraph Garden by Andy Sturgeon
Many people’s (and my) favourite garden at the show, which is an impressive feat considering the unbelievable quality of gardens this year. The inspired mix of Mediterranean and English made for an innovative design which set this garden apart (and earned it ‘Best in Show’). I loved the colour scheme, plant choices and pairings, and well-integrated modern design elements. They don't get much better than this.







Laurent-Perrier Garden by Tom Stuart Smith
I really, really liked this garden. Again, planting was stunning (it seems that this year's theme was rich, loose, naturalistic plantings, which was nice to see). The contrast with modern design elements and shaped boxwood made for a well balanced composition.





Kebony – Naturally Norway by Darren Saines
This garden got mixed reviews from our group of visitors, but I really liked it. The combination of bold, clean modern elements against naturalistic plantings created a powerful visual contrast. The focal point was a gnarled pine, taken from a rock face in a Norwegian quarry along with about 4 tones of rock to preserve its roots. I don't really agree with taking such plants from the wild, but I’m telling myself that maybe it was actually saved from impending destruction. I asked if they were planning to put it back afterwards, but they didn't seem too impressed with that idea. It was going to be planted in a garden instead - hopefully it will survive.





The Tourism Malaysia Garden, by David Cubero & James Wong
This is one of the first times I have seen a well designed tropical garden. Often ‘tropical’ just means a whole lot of random, large-leaved plants. In this garden, however, plants actually appeared to be carefully chosen - predominantly dark green foliage contrasted with lighter ferns and rich burgundy and brown foliage and bark. Set against white stone and dark wood hardscaping, the overall effect was great.



I could go on and on about Chelsea, but it's really something that has to be experienced first hand. It's worth the treat. Just make sure to get there early to avoid the crowds!

Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival, France

Visiting the Festival des Jardins at Chaumont-sur-Loire was a dream come true, and an experience that I would highly recommend to any enthusiastic gardener/designer. This garden festival is the complete antithesis of the uninspired and commercial gardens we visited at the Appeltern “garden idea park” in the Netherlands. Chaumont-sur-Loire offers up garden design as art, with the style and grace perhaps only the French can pull off.
The festival has a few things going for it that make it unique. First, you really can’t go wrong with a setting on the grounds of one of the most beautiful castles in France, in one of the most picturesque regions of the country. Even the entrance way (pictured below) is beautifully landscaped. Second, the gardens are truly billed as art. Their design is often a collaboration between students and artists from very different backgrounds, including landscape architecture, painting, sculpture, and graphics, resulting in creative and original designs. The festival is also perfect in scope, featuring only 24 gardens, just enough to satisfy the eager visitor, but still leaving you wanting more.

It's hard to pick favourites, but here are a few of the gardens I really enjoyed. The theme of last year’s festival (we visited in late August 2009) was colour.

Graine de conscience, by Florence Mercier
In a very small space, this garden moves through three vastly different habitats: lush tropical forest, prairie, and stark desert/rock. I loved the modern style, and the completely seamless transitions between spaces – the habitats couldn’t be more different, yet their connection seemed natural and almost inevitable in this garden.



La ligne jaune, by Gaylord Le Goaziou, Maythinie Eludut et Julien Viniane
The colours in this garden were amazing! We couldn’t get a very good angle to show off the whole garden, but I think the pictures below illustrate the brilliance and inventiveness of the colour combinations.


Transposition, by Florimond Gauvin and Mathouta Vongphouthone
With a spiral boardwalk and beautiful planting, this was a simple garden that managed to be novel and comfortable at the same time.




Lessive en fleurs, by Anaëlle Madec, Jean-François Madec, Clément Constantin
This garden made smart use of a creative element, laundry, to show off colour gradation. By using the very obvious colour theme in the laundry, which is easy to control and obvious to all visitors, it helped highlight the parallel colour motif in the planting. I like gardens with clear themes that any visitor can immediately connect to and understand. The wind also added an interesting element, making the laundry as alive as a windswept planting.






Etang donné, Christophe Cuzin
One of the unique features of this festival is that gardens must fit into a mature site, generally a key requirement in “real” garden design. This particular garden was set in a tiny clearing surrounded by high trees, with only a little bit of light coming in through the central opening. The simple design was perfectly suited to the spot and managed to create a magical and mysterious place. Things don’t always have to be too complicated.


Pénombre, by Alvaro de la Rosa Maura and Patricia Diaz Agrela
Wow – a perfect example of a powerful garden created by exploiting the essence of a single plant, in this case Japanese blood grass. Everything in this garden worked to show off the unique interplay between grass and light, including the contrasting white birch trunks and circular design to show off different lighting angles (and to ensure that backlighting would always be available from at least one angle).



Le jardin "Mange-tête", by Steven Fuhrman, Samson Lacoste, Luc Pinsard
Top marks for fun and creativity. The "head-eating" garden offered coloured bulbs to stick your head in and get a whole new colour experience of the otherwise quite plain planting. People spent a lot of time enjoying themselves in this garden trying the differently coloured bulbs, which were even set at varying heights to accommodate everyone.



Writing this and looking at the pictures of last year just makes me itch to go back again. The theme this year is “Body and Soul" - sounds intriguing...

Chelsea Flower Show, Part 2

Back with more from the CFS! After the show gardens, the Great Pavilion is probably the main attraction of the show. For true gardeners, this is the heart of the show, since it is in fact a flower show despite being better known now as a garden design show. The Great Pavilion is the place where nurseries and various societies from around the world get to showcase their plants. Everything from hundreds of roses in the David Austen Roses display, to fungi from the British Mycological Society, exotic cacti, japanese maples, bonsai, grasses and many, many more. The most amazing part is just incredibly perfect every single plant is. There is not one flaw on any of them - including the carnivorous plants below which were very interesting and were put to dramatic use in the wetland show garden I showed in the last post. It must take an incredible amount of work and planning to have all these plants ready for just one week in spring.

There were several impressive displays. I really loved the Kirstenbosch, South Africa display - they had some amazing plants (again grown to perfection) that you don't get to see every day.

The Cayman Islands Dept of Tourism and Newington Nurseries had a very creative display designed as an underwater landscape but obviously just using regular non-aquatic plants. They did great job with plant selection and lighting - not sure that the picture really does it justice. I think this one got a Gold Medal.

Some nurseries put together really elaborate displays featuring hundreds, if not thousands of plants, like Roger Platts Garden Design and Nurseries.

Jekka's Herb Farm also did a great job using only medicinal herbs for their display.

The Chelsea Flower Show 2009

After many long months of waiting and counting down, the big day finally arrived last week: my very first trip to the Chelsea Flower Show!

Chelsea was as big, grand and inspiring as I was hoping it would be. One of the things I was really struck by was just how seriously this event is taken in the UK. The large grounds of the show were teeming with BBC camera crews doing spotlights on gardens, shows with celebrities (OK, “celebrities” in the gardening world) and interviewing visitors. Every other conversation I overheard was about how that garden looked smaller on TV, or what was said about this garden on a show. And the Chelsea buzz is not just at the show – even as we were visiting gardens outside of London for the long weekend, references to Chelsea were popping up everywhere. Overall, I was impressed with how prominent the show is and the exposure it gets.

Now to the show itself – I could probably do about fifty blogs on it. We arrived there 5 minutes after opening (although we’d planned to be there earlier!), and I couldn’t believe how many people were already there. For a standard show, it would be considered full. We immediately ran over to the “Main Avenue” where the large show gardens are, so we could have a peak without 10 people in front of us. The show gardens were really impressive. It’s remarkable how established and fully mature they can look after only being set in place in the last two weeks. This ain’t no Canada Blooms – no pots of the same hydrangeas or forced bulbs in every garden, poorly hidden in mulch. Plants included everything you can possibly think of, from gigantic trees to wildflower meadows, all perfectly planted with not a hint of artificiality. And of course the water features, hardscaping and other features were all very impressive. Granted, the timing of the show in late May makes this much easier. The gardens also benefit from a backdrop of beautiful, huge trees on the Chelsea Hospital grounds rather than a bleak indoor show hall.
The garden I was most impressed with was the “Wetland Garden” (sponsored by the Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust) pictured above. It had an incredibly natural feel, combined with original design elements. I think it achieved a perfect balance between the natural world and human touch, in a way that is pleasing and comfortable as a garden. It’s inspiring to think that with a little bit of effort, this could actually be in your backyard, to enjoy every day. Another garden that I think achieved this balance perfectly was a small urban garden designed by Angus Thompson & Jane Brockbank. The garden takes inspiration from "memories of forgotten corners in larger gardens". Ahh.. to have a forgotten corner like this one.

Other nice gardens were the Daily Telegraph Garden, which won Best in Show and was designed by Swedish landscape architect Ulf Nordfjell.

The Laurent-Perrier Garden done by first time Chelsea designer Luciano Giubbilei.

And the Marshalls "Living Street" garden showing four different front gardens.
Of course everyone talks about trends that were highlighted at Chelsea. I’m not sure what the official trends were, but I was struck by a few things. First, the very natural planting schemes in many gardens, using more common and natural, non-hybridized flowers was refreshing. Second, the use of colour was very good and clearly something that was paid close attention to in all gardens. I know we’re always told to do this, but it’s hard and it was nice to see it well done at Chelsea. I loved a lot of the gardens on a mostly green theme, but also some of the darker foliage gardens which were very well arranged.

Well, that was a long post and it only takes us through the large show gardens! I'll be back with more from Chelsea soon!