Design Ideas From Chelsea Flower Show

Bunny has been going to the Chelsea Flower Show for over 50 years, she has been a judge of the show gardens there, has been on the selection committee and had various other roles as well as designing 9 show gardens there and winning 6 gold medals.

Watching the gardens being created over a three week build up period allowed her to observe tricks of the trade, interesting ideas and pick up some great design ideas. In this video she selects just a few ideas for designing garden buildings, boundaries, water features, planting and using stunningly trained trees.

Next week she goes down to the flower show to start building the stand for the amazing charity Horatio’s Garden.
 
#chelseaflowershow #gardendesign

Chelsea Flower Show is looming on the horizon. It’s in just over a week and I find Chelsea very exciting. It’s probably the most celebrated flower show in the world and it’s famous for its show gardens. I’ve done nine of these gardens and I’ve also been a judge of the gardens. I’ve been an assessor. I’ve been on the selection panel and so I’ve been participating in all different ways. And I started going when I was about 16, which is almost uh 50 years ago or more. So I’ve been to a fair few of them. And I think um although it’s easy to get carried away with the razatas of the show, I think it’s important when you see a garden or something you really like there, really dig with your eyes and think, you know, why does that work? Why does it look so good? What is it about it? And would it work in my own garden? if you want to do something similar. Um, and I think it’s important to do that and sometimes it’s quite difficult to because there’s so much to see, but really just try and evaluate why something really works for you. So, what I love about building gardens there is because you spend three weeks down there, you see them all come together and you see the different techniques and ways they use to get the garden that they’ve designed. And I find that fascinating. So, I’ve just picked out a sprinkling of the elements that I think look really nice and um just to show you and then obviously we will do another video from this year’s Chelsea later on. And we’ll also show you a small stand that I’m working on this year for Horatio’s garden which is actually although it’s tiny is causing me quite a bit of angst but more of that another time. So, starting off with water. You very rarely get a garden without water at Chelsea because water really brings it to life and usually people start filling their water features in that last week. Um because they’re all thrown together very quickly in just three weeks these big gardens. And as soon as the water comes into the show into the pools, the rivers or features whatever they’re making, it changes the whole climate. It sort of cools it down somehow. It’s really lovely. But the first one is a little pool designed by Mark Anthony Walker many years ago, probably 20, 30 years ago. And I just thought it was just so beautifully detailed. Um it’s got these beautifully chis chiseldressed um flag stones that edge the pool. You can just see that detail. It’s got the pattern of the floor at the bottom of the water. The water is crystal clear and then the lovely pebble on end paving that leads up to it and surrounds it. And it’s those elements plus that whole sort of Mediterranean feeling that goes on there that really makes it successful. And I think when you see many water features, you know, you see the lining, the edge, the coping isn’t so thick as that. Um it doesn’t look so clear. There are many ways a water feature can fall down in the garden, but I think this is one of my favorites. And I’ I’ve look at that picture quite often and I think it’s just so good. The next water feature is just a tiny little bowl um in Sarah Price’s garden that she did a couple of years back which was had lots of those beautiful irises in it. And I think that was the star of the show that garden and everybody talks about it still and I think they’ll be talking about it in years to come. Um but the actual water feature was just tiny little bowl which they had made together with all the pots in the garden from their sand that they made and they dug out holes and they molded them in sight. Now obviously I say that but it took them quite a few tries to get the whole method right and to work but they did look spectacular and um I I think that garden is is just so good because it was so different and the whole thing worked so well together and there was a lot of interest in it. Now, we talked about Tom Banister’s little garden with the cool water pool in it to bathe in. Um, because everybody is into cold well, some people are into cold water immersion. And he made it himself. He made the trough himself from his own type of concrete with a lot of ko in it. And then he came here and showed us how to make them. And I I do think that is a was a wonderful garden. And I think that simple water feature dressed up with the ferns and the mosses and everything like that just really sat nicely in the garden. And that is quite achievable for someone to do in a small space. You even if you don’t like cold water immersion, I think as a water trough it looks really nice. So I think that was a great one. Easy to um copy or take ideas from and and very successful. Now, Robert Goldby has done a few gardens at Chelsea and they’ve all been absolutely first class. Oh, Dollar’s just seen a fox. I think got a fox prowling around at the moment. And Robert um one of the ones he did had this water feature in it. And it was just so lovely because of the wonderful Brussels sprout feature at the centerpiece. Now, that’s just a bit of fun, but it’s something I don’t think even though it’s fun, you would ever get tired of. And it was beautifully executed. So that’s why I popped that one. But you would obviously have to find someone to make something like that for you. And I remember back in the day when it was shown, which was some years ago, it cost about £4,000. Now it would probably add a couple of ns on that or a naugh on that at least. But it it’s fabulous and I still remember it to this day. The first garden that I ever did at Chelsea was a garden for children. And it I did it because I had young children and I had my garden before I had my young children and I didn’t want to fill it with sort of orange climbing frames and purple slides and that sort of thing all in plastic. So I did a garden that showed how you could make a garden for children that would work for adults too. And so the interesting thing I think about this garden was that we did water that was safe for children. And so we did a pool, this pool, and we put in an underwater grid, and we just set it about an inch below the surface. And I measured my children’s feet to make sure the grid size would not allow their feet to slip through it. And then we grew plants up through the mesh so that you could actually not see the mesh at all. And then the rest of the garden, we had other walls that were safe for children. So we had a drainable paddling pool. And then we had a another one with a beach beside it. Oh, and then we had a slow a very shallow stream running through it. So we had three types of water, very shallow, be very difficult to drown in, drainable paddling pool that looked like a real stream and then the underwater grid. And that whole garden was a real learning curve doing your first garden at Chelsea. I had done three competitions uh and the prize for each one was to have your garden built. And I was highly commended in the first two. And then with the wind and willows, we won it. So we built it and that that was a fabulous experience and I really enjoyed it. The first of the nine planting at Chelsea is obviously a big part of it and in the judging the planting occupies quite a few points for the score. But I think what people don’t realize is that when you order your plants for Chelsea, if it’s herbaceous planting and you’ve got a square meter to fill, you will order at least eight plants for that square meter, maybe more. They’ll be planted pot thick. So if you’re using herbaceous and you’ve got them in liter pots, they will literally be cheap by gel touching. And of course, because it’s in May to usually the end of May, you never know what’s going to be in peak flour and what isn’t. And so you order normally three times the amount. And they’ll bring some on fast under glass. They’ll have some outside and some maybe under fleece. So that is partly why these gardens cost so much because you need a lot of backups because you never know exactly how they’re going to perform the plants. And then a lot of these big gardens there are sort of teams of girls that work for set designers for Chelsea and mainly girls I have to say because your plants arrive and they’re surrounding the hard landscaping which has usually been done in the first week of buildup. Do you want to come and sit on my knee too? Come on then. Okay, there’s just about room for two. And so in this in the sort of second to third week you start putting your plants in and the plants surround the garden and they actually it’s more like flower arranging because although you will have done a planting plan to get your numbers right when it actually comes to popping them in although you don’t pop them in you almost just position them um it’s very much done by feel and how it looks at that time. Um, and so I think when people sort of look at the planting and think, “Oh, why doesn’t my garden like that look like that?” It’s because they’ve designed that planting for that particular month and they’re going to make it look spectacular. If you went and looked at the same planting even four weeks later, five weeks later, it wouldn’t look anything like the same. So don’t, please don’t be disenchanted if your garden doesn’t look as florifouserous as that. And you know, it is you do it with immaculate care. When we did the wild meadow turf with the wind in the willows, we were literally brushing the grass with hair brushes. I mean, that’s how it is. Um, and um, the other thing is the style of planting. So, I’ve noticed over the years in sort of 20 odd years ago, there was a lot more block planting. So, they have, you know, five irises, then some roses, and something else. But now, it’s much more matrix planting. So they just mix and match and mingle all the plants together. And um that gives it a very much looser somehow richer effect for a flower show I think than block planting. But some people do still use block planting. And I think in gardens generally I think you get a lot of block planting still um with maybe a few sprinklers throughout it. So you get a sort of mixture of the two styles. But when you look at a garden and you admire it and you admire the plants and the planting style, just bear that in mind. A, what style of planting have they used, why do you like it so much? And how long would it actually look like that for? So Andrew surgeon in this garden has got lots of matrix planting. Um, and I think it looks beautiful the way he’s done it. And the silver birches, you used multi stem silver birches repeatedly throughout it. And of course it is contrasted the sort of ephemeral nature of the planting is contrasted by the very curving walls which I think are a sort of rendered wall but it is a lovely garden but it’s very much of that style. The new who have sponsored Chelsea for the last few years in their garden which wasn’t judged used more block planting as well with a bit of sprinklers through it and I just thought it was interesting to see it’s a more conventional perhaps garden um successful much admired because it did have more structure in it than a lot of gardens. A lot of gardens at Chelsea today seem to be very much more naturalistic, very much more flowing without the structure and stronger styles that perhaps they had a few years back. Um, I’m not quite sure why this is happening because I don’t think it’s reflected in garden design as a whole, but it Chelsea it certainly is going that way. I just thought these pineapples in the bowl which are on Andrew Martin’s trade stand was just such a lovely touch. I mean, if you’re going to do something slightly wacky and divine, Chelsea is obviously the place to do it. And you might not have all those pineapples or a basket like that, but they do look amazing. Tom Spirit Smith’s garden um was a real eyecatcher last year. And the main ingredient probably were the hazels, the multi-m hazels, which were through underplanted with sort of semi- woodland type planting. Um, and I put this in just to show you that the hazels, obviously the hazel tree would naturally grow from the base and you’ll be having lots of hazel shoots coming up from the bottom. You rarely would see a hazel with a clear stem like this. They just don’t grow like that. So, they will have cleaned up the hazels to show the clear stem so you could see the planting through it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have seen it with all the bushiness of the hazels at the bottom. So that is quite you couldn’t I don’t think really keep a hazel like that because it would just be too much work because they throw up shoots repeatedly throughout the year and you’d spend your life tiptoeing through the planting clearing up the hazels. Um another interesting point was Tom suddenly saw the white roded engines at the last minute and so he put them in and he bought them and put them in and you can do that with the garden. If you suddenly see something that’s in flower that you hadn’t considered before but a nursery offers them to you then you go for it. You make a lot of lastm minute decisions if you see something that you think will look really spectacular and they were much remarked upon even though rod engines aren’t possibly a most fashionable plant at the moment but he used them in the way that they looked great. Now many trees feature in Chelsea gardens and they’re used often in quite an iconic way so you remember them. Um, and when I did my first garden, the wind in the willows garden, we were looking for a hollow tree which we could put a door on the front and make into a little house. And we found this polarded willow in a meadow not far from here. And the farmer very kindly let us use it. And we didn’t actually dig it up with the roots. We literally cut it off at ground level where the trunk hit the ground with about that much if soil below it if that. But what surprised me was by the time we lifted the willow tree at the end of Chelsea, so it probably been there for three and a half weeks, something like that, it actually rooted into the ground. And that just shows you the powers of regeneration of willows. Um, and you often do see willows at Chelsea. I saw some lovely young polarded willows that look really nice on a garden in Chelsea with a boardwalk running through them. Umbrella trees h are very popular nowadays and you can get them quite readily and I thought these were really lovely. They were hawthorns and they formed a lovely strong statement either side of the water feature and sometimes you you see them arranged over a sitting area and we’ve often used them like that. You can either make your own or you can buy them ready made depending on your budget. Um but it it just shows you what you can do with the tree and that that’s one of the things at Chelsea. You see trees of all shapes and sizes. And I saw these stunning trees, plain trees grown with a bend. And I think they had just been like that on the nursery, perhaps in a windy situation or something. And so they’d started to go like that. And I think the nursery thought they’d make a feature of that and so carried on training with a bend like that. So it just shows you the versatility of trees. You often get big statement trees like Sarah Price use these really lovely pine trees in her iris garden and they go brilliantly with the irises and that deep dark emerald green went so well with the pinky walls behind it. The second garden we ever did was a treehouse. And it was the first treehouse ever done at Chelsea. And it was very difficult finding a big enough tree that we could lift, bring into Chelsea that didn’t need a police escort because we had quite a restricted budget. I think the whole garden was 22,000 or something. But we eventually found one on the farm next door. It was in a avenue. He didn’t like it because it had a very split trunk, which for me was ideal. So we bought a big tree spade and we lifted it out in about February March just before it shot into leaf and then we are you coming back up and then we took it um down to Chelsea and that was extraordinary and then making the treehouse the first ever treehouse at Chelsea and we put a moat around it and we made it into an outdoor office. So the idea was you had your lovely private space moed. You could get away from the family and work from home. And that was probably 25 years ago. So a little bit before the working for home came a big thing, but it was coming in then for sure. Walls and boundaries are really important at Chelsea because you have your plot whether it’s a small one or a large one and you don’t want people viewing your garden to be distracted by the garden next door. So, I think you can pick up an awful lot of really good ideas for boundaries. Um, a lot of them are just pi plywood painted and if you have marine ply and when we did the Port Marian garden, we made all the buildings and the walls and everything from a a plywood which we then painted with what looked like a render. Um, and and again for the boat race, we did that and that’s a very inexpensive way to to make a wall. Um, and our garden, the one from Port Mariam, went on to Jules Holland, the musician who is a big port or was a big Port Marian fan. I don’t know how long it lasted. This one with from Kate Gould. She did this lovely outdoor plunge pool and then she did what I thought was quite innovative innovative boundary. She did cotton steel, the rusty steel, which is all the rage. And then next to it, she did the gappy bricks. And they both looked very modern. They’re the same color tones. And I thought it was just an interesting way to have a boundary. Kate Ghoul’s gardens are generally very modern, full of very good detailing, and she really thinks them through. And unlike most designers, she designs and builds all her own garden, and that’s what she does. So that is and she doesn’t get a sponsor. So normally people have sponsors because a big gardens cost 300k minimum often. Um it seems extraordinary but that is the cost because you’ve got to build them, take them down, which is almost the cost of rebuilding and put people up in London and get all these different plants in case things fail. So it’s a very expensive process. But she she foots the bills herself. So I my hats off to Kate Cool. I think she does a fabulous job and has entertained many people with her real state-of-the-art gardens. Um, there’s been quite a few walls with gabians and I thought this patchwork wall, which is a mixture of sort of concrete blocks and different elements within it, was quite interesting. And also because it’s the sort of thing you could make from home, um, you know, if you had a bit of this and a bit of that. And because it’s all done like that, it doesn’t look a mishmash. The concrete blocks in between really hold it together. We’ve done that with paving too with stone slabs with bricks in between or coins on flat in between, roof tiles in between, all different things in the checkerboard gaps that the stone paving left. It’s a lovely idea, a way to make a surface or a a wall. Flint is always wonderful, I think, as when you drive through flint buildings or flint areas with lots of buildings in them off flint, they look fantastic. And I thought this was interesting because they’ve encased the flint within a metal framework which sort of made it stand out more somehow and obviously it’s enapped flint which means it’s slightly dressed. Um so I just thought that was a lovely bit of flint work. Fiona Lawrence did this lovely garden a garden in provence I think she called it and that must have been 20 plus years ago. And what I loved about it was the way she got that sort of very aged look to that render. Very provenal, very convincing. And if you notice, it’s not monotone. It’s not just one color of that sort of ointment pink, but it’s sort of all different colors blended in. And the render isn’t smooth. It’s more rustic. It’s more uneven. And I think rendered walls with maybe a little bit of stone round entrances or something can be absolutely fantastic. They can look very modern or they can look quite as though they’ve been there forever. So whether you want to be more rustic or state-of-the-art, cutting edge, you can choose the finish of it to suit. Lots of the gardens at Chelsea have buildings and you see all different styles there. And um I think I put this one of the bunker in because I’ve never seen a bunker at Chelsea before, but imagine all the work to excavate that out, build the bunker. Um I mean it’s phenomenal the amount of lengths people go to, hence the high cost of build. But maybe in the future we’ll all be wanting our own bunkers. Who knows? But anyway, and then this building which is by Chris Beardaw, he’s done a fair few gardens at Chelsea too. I put in because I thought it was interesting in that he’s done the very Banaman style timber pavilion which is very traditional and then he’s put the very modern wings on either side with the brilliant blue background. Now I don’t think the two styles work but um Yi and I had a discussion on this in the office and she liked it and she thought we should include it. So I did include it but I do think it’s quite difficult if you mix two styles with a building with your home. It is lovely sometimes to see a modern glazed addition onto a sort of medieval house. I think it can look stunning. Don’t get me wrong. I do like mixing it, but I find this slightly upsetting the balance of the two in this garden. And then I like this little garden. It was a small garden and it was done from cork. So you buy cork sheeting and she put in this whole building made of cork and cork is actually amazingly durable and it was quite clever because it’s tiny. She then studded it with mosses and then she put this glass roof so it looked rustic but then you had this really modern touch in between and for a building to have the light flooding in through the ceiling is really quite nice. Now this is a trade stand. This is um a sort of shepherd’s hut by Plank Bridge. And I put this in because it’s got the little bath, the wood burning stave. And I thought, you know, whether you were a millionaire or porpa, spending a few weeks in this would be appealing, whatever, because it’s just beautifully done, beautifully set up. And I’m interested to see what Plankbridge are going to do this year because apparently they’ve got an outdoor sauna and no doubt they will make it look beautiful. And as I’m heavily into sauners, I’ll be fascinated to go and have a really good look at their stand this year. Now, this isn’t a building. This was on Andrew Martin’s stand. It’s a it’s a a display stand. It’s not a garden, but I just thought it was quite interesting because he’s got fairly modern furniture and then he’s built this very structure, very rustic structure behind made with anything he can lay his hands on. Well, that’s what it looks like. Obviously, it’s not, but and I think it’s the sort of thing that’s very achievable. Most of us could do that or know someone who could do it for them in my case. And um I think it’s fun and it’s different and it’s very much of the moment, isn’t it? Using reclaim material and um it certainly would be a place that I would want to use. Well, that’s it. Um, I have got literally hundreds of thousands of photographs of Chelsea over the years. So, I’ve only shown you a very small selection, but if you have time to go there, that’s brilliant. Or watch it on the telly. We’ll send you some YouTube videos, too. And I hope you have great weather, and I hope it’s a great show.