(28 Mar 2017) LEADIN:
Front gardens are getting a makeover at London’s largest interior design show.
Horticultural students are re-imagining the front garden in a bid to boost community spirit, help the environment and also improve kerb appeal and property value.
STORYLINE:
These fancy front gardens have pride of place at the Ideal Home Show in London.
This seat among the flowers looks like the perfect spot to pass an hour or two on a sunny afternoon.
Just like a real front garden, these are the first things visitors must cross as they enter the show.
However, the front garden is considered something of a relic of the past – back when neighbours shared a cup of tea over the garden wall.
Experts at the show claim the front garden has become a dumping ground for bikes and wheelie bins, or paved over to park a car.
Chartered horticulturist and television gardener David Domoney is here at the Ideal Home Show to revive the front garden.
He says: “There’s been a great demise in British front gardens, we have lost them in their millions and that has an impact, not only on drainage or aesthetics but also on wildlife too. Cultivation Street which is a national campaign to support community gardens and front gardens has worked with the colleges this year to put forward a series of inspirational front gardens to hopefully make people do more with that space outside the front with optical illusions to make it look bigger, or even a garden like this one where most of the borders are planted up with varieties that you can eat.”
The Young Gardener of the Year awards, working in association with the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, has tasked six of the UK’s leading horticultural colleges to create their vision of a sustainable urban front garden.
The gardens cannot just look great, they also have to serve a practical purpose.
With this is mind every team had to find a space to accommodate a wheelie bin. This smart solution from Shuttleworth College uses a simple mirrored trellis to create an optical illusion, hiding an ugly bin.
Domoney explains: “They’re creating beautiful aesthetic gardens that overcome some of the practicalities – some have storage for bikes, every one of them has a way to combat that ugly looking wheelie bin and still create something really quite beautiful to put a smile on your face when you get home from work.”
Ryan Boyton, a horticulture student from Writtle University College demonstrates his neat solution to store the wheelie and recycling bin.
He wanted to create a garden without barriers and with plenty of space to sit and talk.
“Well the garden we’ve designed here is a community based garden. So with the seating and our planters you can literally sit anywhere and bring friends over, talk to them and just relax in the garden plus we don’t have any high boundaries so this allows you to lean over and talk to your neighbours and there’s no big front walls, so if anybody is walking by they can stop and have a chat and obviously come walk in easily and join you and sit down.”
Event director of the Ideal Home Show, Giles Perry explains why the garden is such an important area of living space for the home.
He says: “It’s bringing flowers, it’s bringing wildlife back into the front garden and just trying to connect them more with the home. I think they’ve been forgotten and people are just too much paving over their front garden. And this is trying to get people to think about that as an extra living space, as they do with the back garden, it is trying to do the same sort of thing with the front garden.”
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