This Thursday sees the start date for the building of Gavin McWilliam and Andrew Wilsons garden at Chelsea. It’s been a long haul for them, but now we’re talking about days rather than weeks until the garden becomes a reality.
The final arrangements are all falling into place very nicely. During this last week Andrew and Gavin have approved the finish on the concrete, cantilevered platform.
The rammed earth walls are being constructed off-site and will be delivered next week. This is the proto-type, built to see exactly how the finish would look, you can see the walls at the back of the garden in the sketch above.
The range of medals awarded at the Chelsea Flower Show and all the other R.H.S. shows are gold, silver-gilt, silver and bronze. Now it would be fair to assume that every designer at the Chelsea Flower Show would like to be awarded a gold medal for their garden.
However, pinning all hopes on a gold medal can make life difficult, nothing can be guaranteed, it can even inhibit creativity when what’s needed is the freedom of an inspired vision. This requires an attitude that takes a mix of confidence, passion, experience and a good team of people working together who share that same vision.
“Our aim is to create a beautiful and interesting garden” Gavin says, “taking the opportunity to explore materials and details that we may not necessarily get to use on a daily basis.”
In pursuit of this goal they have used their experience of many projects, concentrating not only on a design that looks good but also works perfectly in construction.
Andrew says
“ As for medals, obviously we would be delighted with a higher medal but we happily surrender to the judging process. We’ll travel hopefully, along with our sponsor.”
I’m looking forward to visiting Chelsea next week to see how the garden is looking, I’ll take some photos for you to see in next weeks post.
Last weeks post was all about the plants and the nursery where the plants are being looked after, you can see it here
Jill
images: Gavin McWilliam
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