Maybe I just wore the right shoes [these things matter when you’re walking round for six hours] or got there when the light was just right, but I particularly enjoyed The Chelsea Flower Show this year.
It’s such a pleasure to see beautiful gardens at peak perfection, but this year it seemed even more special.
There was sumptuous planting, and not just on the big show gardens, garden designer Butter Wakefield planted this little area with inspiring colours and shapes, mingling them all with soft, grassy fronds of Stipa tennuisima.
I like the orange Geum at the front
purple spikes of herbaceous perennial Salvia x sylvestris ‘Mainacht’
Photos of plant combinations are useful for inspiration, maybe using different plants but keeping the same colours.
As well as the big show gardens [I wrote about these on Monday], there are two other categories; Artisan Gardens that use more traditional materials and designs and Fresh Gardens that are usually more conceptual and often have an important message to get across in their design.
There was something captivating about The Garden of Potential designed by Propagating Dan in the Fresh category.
I liked the wooden guttering, collecting rain-water and depositing it in the garden to water plants, it’s practical but encloses the garden too in a nicely, sculptural way.
The Garden of Potential
Some of the plants were supplied by Crug Farm Plants in Wales, it’s run by proper plant-hunters so they stock interesting and unusual plants.
The World Vision Garden by John Hoyland looks pretty groovy and at first seems a little impractical, but carries a big message. The waves of turf represent the ups and downs of some of the most vulnerable children in the world, the trees signify breaking through providing shelter and support.
World Vision Garden- the trees are Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer
the orange flowers are Tulip Ballerina and the small evergreen shrub is Nandina domestica, one of my all-time favourites
I like the solid metal edging that defines all the grass, Everedge are good for this, and the shingle sets off the plants well and makes it more difficult for weeds to grow.
You can read my post from Monday about some of the show gardens here
I like links in blogs that help me discover new and interesting plants and people, so I hope these are useful for you:
find out more about World Vision here , Butter Wakefield here and Crug Farm Plants here
Jill
all photos: Jill Anderson.
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