Chelsea inspirations

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Artisan Gardens, Heucheraholics, Hillier Nurseries, Jo Thompson, Khora, RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2104, RNIB 'In the Mind's Eye' Garden, Silene diocia 'Firefly', World Vision

Rose-bud Gorilla by Pollyfields – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

Chelsea Flower Show is packed with so much to see that it’s a bit hard to take it all in when you’re actually there. Scrolling through the photos once I got home and seeing the coverage on TV always makes me wish I could pop back for another visit to soak it all up in a slightly less frantic way.

Khora conservatory – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

Where else would you see an orang-utan, a rose-bud encrusted gorilla, a £200,000 conservatory, bump into Christopher Biggins and see World War One commemorated with plants? The person dressed up as an orang-utan wandering around the World Vision garden seemed a bit random. The attention to detail on the rose-bud gorilla was incredible – there was a lavender elephant too – but I did wonder how anyone would have the patience to create such sculptures and whilst they smelt amazing, I couldn’t work out who would buy one. That’s a thought which quite often creeps into your head at Chelsea. As spectacular as the Khora dome-roofed conservatory was it’s hard to imagine who would part with £200,000 for such a building. But those hospitality tents at Chelsea aren’t there just to feed and water the plant lovers who visit over the course of the week. As Ed Cumming’s wrote last year in The Telegraph, Chelsea has become a place for big businesses, politicians and dignitaries to network. Who knows, perhaps Khora’s order book will be full by the end of the week.

The House of Fraser Textile Garden – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

The Fresh Gardens are smaller spaces with a more contemporary feel. The’ In the Mind’s Eye’ Garden for the RNIB was fantastic. Designed as a sensory garden it had water, textural planting and vibrant colours. The colour combinations in some of the borders might not appeal to everyone as there was a lot going on but it was designed with those with visual impairments in mind where extra colours and contrast are important. I was so pleased this won ‘Best in Show’ in its category. The quirky House of Fraser Garden really caught my eye. I loved the colours on display and the idea that textile design can be inspired by nature.

Silene diocia ‘Firefly’ – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

In the Great Pavilion I came across this beauty, Silene diocia ‘Firefly’. I wonder if it would make a good cut flower?

Heucheraholis – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

I thought the Heucheraholics stand commemorating the First World War was outstanding.

The Hillier’s exhibit was something else. They take their displays at Chelsea to another level with trees as tall as the pavilion and so many plants packed into their space it was quite breathtaking.

Floral dresses – Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

The Chelsea Florist of the Year competition and the row of dresses decorated with flowers and plant material was really inspiring and I took an epic amount of photos of the incredible detail.

Chelsea 2014 ©2014 Ian Curley

And who could resist a photo on this cutie? He was one of the dogs brought in to check the showground for explosives before the Queen arrived. Tail wagging, he was lead into the gardens sniffing for anything untoward. They’re obviously trained to not to eat anything they shouldn’t. Imagine if they got a rogue dog in one year who took a fancy to some violas or who cocked his leg on a box ball.

My favourite part of Chelsea has to be the Serpentine Walk in a leafy area where you’ll find the Artisan Gardens. In this quiet secluded spot it’s much easier to appreciate the gardens and plants. I wish the RHS would devote a separate space to the Fresh Gardens. In my opinion, the Fresh Gardens suffer from being just off Main Avenue in front of the Great Pavilion – there’s just so much competing for your attention. It’s often hard to know what’s a garden and what’s a trade stand. I thought the planting on Jo Thompson’s ‘Town Square’ Garden was so beautiful but it all got rather lost in amongst the giant potpourri animals and expensive barbecues. How different it would have been if Jo’s garden had been placed in a similar setting to the Artisan Gardens.

So that’s it for another year but there’s plenty for me to take away from Chelsea 2014. I’ll be seeking out plum and wine coloured flowers for my cutting patch next year. I’m hoping to take inspiration from the floral dresses for the book I’m working on and, thanks to Mr Kazuyuki, I want to learn more about Japanese gardens.

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On Show

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Brewin Dolphin Garden, Cleve West, Joe Swift, Lysimachia 'Beaujolais', M&G Garden, RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2104

© 2014 Ian Curley

Of all the RHS flower shows it is Chelsea where the gardens feature the most prominently. For some people they receive too much attention with reams of copy in the newspapers and the seemingly endless dissecting on TV. I have to admit that I do find certain elements of the coverage veers towards navel gazing and pretentiousness but I think this is inevitable when garden designers are discussing their contemporaries. It’s not just gardening which is guilty of this. Take a look at some of the food programmes on the TV at the moment and you’ll see the strange phenomenon whereby chefs are achieving a god-like status. And does anyone actually manage to sit through more than 10 minutes of any of those awards ceremonies without feeling nauseous? For me though, the gardens make Chelsea special.

The show gardens along Main Avenue are the starry element to the event. These are the haute couture of the gardening world. For most of us they are fantasy gardens but not for everybody. The Nancy Dell’Olio lookalike who stood next to me as we both looked towards The Telegraph Garden proceeded to tell the retinue around her that her own garden would look pretty much exactly like this by the end of the summer. It’s easy to dismiss these gardens as purely window dressing just as many do with catwalk fashion but just as the clothes we wear are influenced by the top fashion designers, their ideas filtering down to the high street, so do the trends, designs and plants used in the show gardens. I do shudder at the thought of how much money is spent on the large gardens but Chelsea has become a shop window for the best in British garden design.

I think the controversy that’s sparked every year when the medals are announced is fantastic. Why did so-and-so get a silver-gilt and not a gold, particularly when what’s-he-called got Best in Show? If the judges award more than 5 golds they’re being too generous, any less and they’re being too strict. I feel desperately for anyone who receives a silver or, even worse, a bronze. All that hard work and then you have to put on the brave face and say the medal doesn’t matter because the public love it. In reality we all know that if you go to all the trouble of putting yourself forward to design a garden you want silver-gilt at the very least. Or is that just my competitive streak talking?

Patrick Collins’ ‘A Garden for First Touch at St George’s’ – Chelsea 2014 © 2014 Ian Curley

I thought there was a lot to like about this year’s Chelsea gardens. Patrick Collins’ ‘A Garden for First Touch at St. George’s Hospital’ used the old rock bank and I loved the contrast his garden, built on a slope, provided to the relative flatness of the other show gardens. The planting was stunning, as was the use of the rusty steel, and it was one of the gardens which I felt offered realistic inspiration to your average gardener.

Matthew Childs’ Brewin Dolphin Garden received a silver-gilt but I really can’t see why he didn’t get a gold. Beautiful planting, stunning features and a joy to look at.

Cleve West’s M&G Garden. I love it from this angle. © 2014 Ian Curley

I’m a huge fan of Cleve West and was hugely looking forward to seeing his Persian inspired garden for M&G. Strangely though the garden didn’t have the impact I thought it would. It was beautifully executed and had fabulous planting but the front part of the garden which represented the dry, arid areas of the Iranian landscape slightly jarred. The odd thing was when I got home and looked through Wellyman’s photos it all seemed to work. Wellyman and I both came to the conclusion that the garden worked as a whole when viewed from certain points but not others.

The Rich brothers and their ‘A Night Sky Garden’ – Chelsea 2014′ © 2014 Ian Curley

The Rich brothers designed a fantastic artisan garden last year so I was looking forward to seeing their first show garden and I wasn’t disappointed. They take their inspiration from the landscape around their home in the Brecon Beacons, a place I know well. I loved the natural planting, the lack of bling and the idea that the garden will be used after Chelsea at an autistic centre in Cardiff.

The Telegraph Garden – Chelsea 2014 – I like the shot of colour here from Gladiolus byzantinus. © 2014 Ian Curley

The Telegraph Garden just didn’t do it for me, it was just too slick for my liking. Everyone seemed so taken with the pristine lawn but it just looked so green it could have been fake. Aren’t these types of lawns a little old-fashioned now anyway – a monoculture needing way too much attention, often of the chemical kind, and offering no real benefits to our native wildlife? Of all the gardens it felt the most corporate, the one which would appeal most to a city banker. It’s the type of garden I’d like to see less of at Chelsea. The geometric layout of Luciano Giubbilei’s Laurent Perrier Garden didn’t appeal but the planting was superb. A cool palette of creams, lemons and greens provided a nice contrast to the berry colours of reds and purples in evidence elsewhere.

Anchusa azurea ‘Loddon Royalist’ – Chelsea 2014 © 2014 Ian Curley

And that takes me to a point that has slightly niggled me for the last few years. The similarity in planting really can’t be a coincidence. Last year you couldn’t get stirred for cow parsley. Now I love a bit of frothy planting but I wouldn’t expect to see it on every garden. This year it was the turn of irises, aquilegia and Lysimachia ‘Beaujolais’. I know it’s spring and there are certain plants which are at their best now but the fact that the same plants, in the same colours turn up on different gardens is just a bit odd. Perhaps not so odd when you see that the gardens which shared the similar planting were all supplied by the same plant nursery. In the past it has been dismissed as ‘great minds think alike’ but, at last, Joe Swift suggested last night on the TV that it might well have something to do with nurseries presenting the designers with plants that will be at their peak for Chelsea week. The plum and claret colours I saw this year were really inspirational and I’m already thinking about ways I can incorporate them into my cut flower patch but perhaps for the gardens to be truly distinctive the issue of plant suppliers needs to be addressed.

 

 

Hot, Hot, Hot – Chelsea 2014

Tags

BoJo the crocheted gorilla, Brewin Dolphin, Hooksgreen Herbs, Ken Muir, Matt Keightley, Matthew Childs, RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2104

Aquilegia stellata ‘Ruby Port’ (copyright Ian Curley)

Following on from the theme of my last post, May really wouldn’t be May without the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and that’s where I found myself yesterday.

Chelsea induces in me the levels of excitement you normally witness in children in the run up to Christmas. This plant extravaganza is, for me, the equivalent of a sea of presents under the Christmas tree. Perhaps this will explain my inability to get much sleep the night before. Strange sounds coming from the kitchen of the bed and breakfast didn’t help. To my sleep deprived brain it sounded like the frantic spoon-clearing of a yoghurt pot. There was a point when I lay there thinking, ‘I’m staying in some complete stranger’s house and how do I know they don’t have some odd midnight yoghurt eating craving’, until Wellyman pointed out it was just their dog lapping up water from its bowl!!!

Last year was my first visit to Chelsea. To say I was chuffed when I received a pass for Monday’s Press Day was an understatement. Unfortunately, the shine wore off rather quickly as I wandered around the show ground. There were mutterings and grumbles from the assembled crowd that the RHS was playing it safe with the designs it had picked and that the planting was lacklustre. The latter was no real surprise after last year’s very cold spring and it all left me thinking I hadn’t seen Chelsea at its best.

Sultry planting was a theme at Chelsea 2014 (copyright Ian Curley)

But what a difference a year can make – Chelsea 2014 felt like a different place. I’m sure this had a lot to do with the weather. Last year I was nithered (Geordie for bloody freezing). The grey, laden skies made everything look quite flat, and photography in the Great Pavilion was difficult because of the low light levels. Yesterday with blue skies and baking sunshine everything seemed to sparkle. It was almost as if the designers had an inkling it might be a scorcher with water features incorporated into several gardens and rich, sultry planting that seemed just perfect for the conditions.

It wasn’t just the weather though that had made the difference. Apart from a couple of well-known designers, the RHS had chosen to champion some younger horticultural talent and I really feel it needed this. There has been a tendency over the years for designers to create show gardens which I’m sure appeal to very wealthy potential clients but leave me feeling ambivalent. I rarely dislike them and I can see the skill involved in the creation but I just don’t connect with them. They feel very much like status symbol gardens and a tad formulaic with the pre-requisite finely cut hard landscaping, uncomfortable looking furniture and a building of some description that tends to dominate the whole space. There were inevitably still elements of that yesterday and I’m realistic enough to realise that Chelsea has become much more than a stage for plants but I felt there was a much better balance this time.

Help for Heroes ‘Hope on the Horizon’ garden – Chelsea 2014 (copyright Ian Curley)

Just as it’s hard to cover the whole of the show in the 6 or so hours I spent there – I’ll watch the TV coverage when I get home and wonder how I managed to miss a particular exhibit or newly introduced plant – it’s impossible to cover the day in one post so there’ll be a few posts over the course of the week. But, for now, here are a few of my highlights from Chelsea 2014.

The sultry colours of Lysimachia atropurpurea ‘Beaujolais’, Aquilegia vulgairs var. stellata ‘Black Barlow’ and ‘Ruby Port’, Sangiusorba menziesii and Rosa ‘Darcy Bussell’.

Brewin Dolphin Garden – Chelsea 2014 (copyright Ian Curley)

Choosing a favourite show garden this year is difficult but I think it would have to be the Brewin Dolphin garden designed by Matthew Childs. The copper archways with the verdigris patina were stunning and gave the garden the wow factor without that element of bling that can so often be the focus of a show garden. The planting was a superb mix and included my favourite combination of Lysimachia ‘Beaujolais and Aquilegia ‘Ruby Port’. The Help for Heroes ‘Hope on the Horizon’ garden designed by 29 year old Matt Keightley came a close second. I loved the dappled light created by the hornbeam trees and the shade they cast worked incredibly well in the strong sunlight. Another favourite was the Royal Bank of Canada Waterscape Garden by Hugo Bugg who, at the age of 26, has become the youngest winner of a gold medal at Chelsea.

Royal Bank of Canada Waterscape Garden – Chelsea 2014 (copyright Ian Curley)

Can anyone have enough bun moss? Well not if you’re Kazuyuki Ishihara, designer of the Best in Show Artisan Garden. His ‘Paradise on Earth’ garden was truly stunning. The attention to detail is incredible and he always packs so much into his designs I could stand and look at them for hours marvelling at the intricacy.

A Paradise on Earth by Ishihara Kazuyuki (copyright Ian Curley)

Away from the show gardens of Main Avenue the rustic feel and stunning planting of ‘The Topiarist’s Garden’ in the Artisan category is more what I would look for in a garden and I could quite happily have taken it home with me.

The hottest day of the year so far meant the scent in the Great Pavilion was AMAZING. You could smell the strawberries on the Ken Muir stand before you got to them. The masses of lilies, hyacinths and roses too filled the air with a heady fragrance. It really was WOW!

And, I know it’s a bit twee but I did have soft spot for the Hooksgreen Herbs stand which was inspired by Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. I really feel for the person dressed up as aforesaid bunny, who must have been cooking inside all that fur.

BoJo – a crocheted gorilla (copyright Ian Curley)

I’m not sure why but gorillas kept cropping up. If you want to part with a substantial wad of cash you could buy a humongous statue of one for your garden … well, each to their own. If you fancied a gorilla with an extra dimension you could have one clad in shells or lavender flowers, but my favourite had to be BoJo, a crocheted sculpture of a gorilla named after Boris Johnson. I know it sounds odd but it was quite incredible. Maybe someone didn’t understand the concept of ‘guerilla gardening’?

So, to sum up Chelsea 2014 – hot weather, hot planting and some hot new design talent.