THE LANDSCAPING SOLUTIONS BLOG
Welcome to our Blog. Inspiration, updates and industry trends from the team at Landscaping Solutions.
RHS CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW - USEFUL GARDENS OR MERELY THEATRE?
One of the smallest services performed by us this month was actually one of the most enjoyable. After all, even the smallest job takes on a certain cachet, when it entails visiting RHS Chelsea.
The CAMFED Garden designed by Jilayne Rickards, bringing Zimbabwe to Chelsea. Photo credit: Helen Gazeley.
Attention to detail is an aspect of the job that we take really seriously at Landscaping Solutions, and if there’s one place you’ll find it in spades, it’s Chelsea Flower Show.
Jilayne Rickards, for whom we were delivering materials to add some finishing touches to what was her first Chelsea show garden, designed the CAMFED Garden - promoting “Giving Girls in Africa a Space to Grow”, an initiative by the Campaign for Female Education. Intended to bring rural Africa to central London, it incorporated an open-air classroom to underline CAMFED’s commitment to education. Made using the same techniques employed in Zimbabwe, it has a completely authentic air.
Mark Gregory’s Welcome to Yorkshire garden at RHS Chelsea 2019. Photo credit: Helen Gazeley.
Further down Main Avenue, Mark Gregory created his second show garden for Welcome to Yorkshire. Last year, his Gold-winning design recreated a hillside complete with stone bothy and trickling beck. This year a canal scene incorporated two full-size sets of genuine lock gates, towpath and, behind the scenes, fifteen different pumps creating the water effect.
Dramatic, certainly, and Mark’s in particular generated a huge amount of media interest…but are they gardens? It’s a question that raises its head every year. After all, is anyone coming to the show really going to go home determined to put a Yorkshire waterway in the back garden, any more than they’ll want to install an African classroom?
Thinking like this misses the point. It’s easy to argue that there’s little for the public to take away from the Show Gardens and the RHS seem to have taken that on board with their introduction of Space to Grow gardens, a category which replaced the controversially contemporary Fresh Gardens last year.
Details make the picture in Jilayne Rickard’s CAMFED Garden for RHS Chelsea Flower Show, 2019. Copyright RHS. Credit: RHS/Sarah Cuttle.
What these carefully constructed scenes do, though, is demonstrate attention to detail. Designers and builders reproduce a scene so faithfully on such a small area of ground that for a moment you’re there.
To create that moment, the attention to detail, not to mention the thought and planning behind it, is phenomenal. And if you can do that with a show garden, then how much more are you going to be able to think your way around a design conundrum in the real world and create the perfectly detailed garden for a client?
There’s been criticism in recent years about an apparent lack of attention to the plants and too much focus on design, but the show gardens at RHS Chelsea have a serious purpose: to demonstrate what designers and contractors at the height of their game are capable of achieving. Theatre? Yes. This is true performance.
Landscaping Solutions is no stranger to the accuracy and attention to detail required by gardens like these. Apart from five BALI award-winners, we’ve constructed several Gold and Silver-Gilt award-winning gardens at RHS Hampton Court.
Light at the End of the Tunnel, Matthew Childs Gold-winning garden at Hampton Court Flower Show 2012.
Part of Landscaping Solutions’ vision is to create a fulfilling work environment for our staff because teamwork is at the heart of award-winning gardens. Our teams love a challenge, and show gardens give us the chance to show our true colours in a place where there’s no place to hide. Next month we’ll be putting all our skills to work for the fourth time at Hampton Court Flower Show, for Michelle Brandon’s The Forest Will See You Now.
Come back next month for more details. In the meantime, for information on how Landscaping Solutions can put show garden detail into your outdoor space, contact Ben on 0208 2412402 or email info@landscapingsolutionsltd.co.uk.
RHS AWARDED £4M NATIONAL LOTTERY GRANT
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) announced recently that they have secured a £4 million grant from the National Lottery. The grant money will allow the RHS to construct the world’s first National Centre for Horticultural Science and Learning, as well as develop three new gardens covering 1.2 hectares and restore their current laboratory.
Set to open in 2020, the proposed centre will be constructed at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey and will feature state-of-the-art research facilities, as well as showcase over one million nationally important science and heritage items for public viewing.
Items such as the Chilean potato plant brought back by Charles Darwin in 1834 (from which our modern potatoes are derived) and lavender collected in France in 1731 are just some of the items that will eventually be showcased.
More than 86,000 herbarium specimens, 24,000 insect specimens, 30,000 pieces of botanical art, 250,000 photographs and 100,000 books charting more than half a millennium of gardening history, will also be moved to the new centre when it opens.
The development of 1.2 hectares surrounding the centre will also see the creation of three new gardens - the Wildlife Garden, the World Food Garden and the Wellbeing Garden. Designed by RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medal winning garden designers and RHS scientists the gardens themselves will act as living laboratories for the centre.
The third and final stage of the development will see the iconic RHS Garden Wisley’s Grade II-listed laboratory restored and opened to the public in 2021.
RHS Director General, Sue Biggs, said: “For more than a century RHS scientists have been working away behind closed doors in our modest laboratory conducting ground-breaking research that impacts us all.
During this time, we have researched the best plants to soak up air pollution, to cool buildings and to help pollinators, and these new facilities will enable us to enter a new era of discovery.
Over the next five years, thanks to National Lottery players, we will reveal incredible horticultural treasures to the public so people can experience the wonders of gardening and see why we need everyone everywhere to garden and grow plants for the good of people, plants and the planet”.
The National Lottery grant is undoubtedly a great boost for the development of such an ambitious project and the funding will obviously enable RHS Garden Wisley’s to get the project off the ground. However a further £2 million does still need to be raised in order to see the project through to completion, ensuring RHS Garden Wisley’s buildings, gardens and collections are protected for future generations.
If you would like to support this project or other RHS initiatives then please visit the RHS website for further information.