Garden Centre

Monday, May 19, 2008

Chelsea themes - colours you won't see this year!

It’s an interesting start to the Chelsea Flower Show. If you have a preview pass you may (or may not) have a photographic pass too. I don’t, so no photographs from me, I’m afraid. However, I can say with some certainty that the big themes emerging this year are very evident.

The last couple of years have been about glitz – many prizewinning gardens have had tricks, jokes or just downright showiness at their heart - but this year we can expect the gold medals to go to much more understated gardens, for the simple reason that the casino-bright gardens of previous years have disappeared almost entirely. So pots like these were almost entirely missing from the preview day.

Water and eco-gardening are two substantial themes this year, because for the first time the organisers have lifted their ban on animals to allow fish in one of the gardens – which we actually view from the side, so that we’re seeing a water garden as if we were underneath it, not on top of it. Eco-gardening was ‘imposed’ by the committee, and each garden designer has had to explain how his or her will be dismantled and disposed of, something that’s never happened before.

But the real difference this year is that the gardens are green – from Arabella Lennox-Boyd's minimalist design (a path across a pond curving one way, a ribbon of water lilies intersecting it) to the lovely Global Warming garden by the University of East Anglia, it's notable that green is the predominant colour.

Labels: chelsea flower show

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:11 AM

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