‘Everyone has a wish’. Landscape architect Kendra Inman helped wishes grow on trees for the 2012 Chelsea Fringe. The labels (produced by school children, students and locals) were decorated to look like flowers and fruits. They were hung from trees at Dovehouse Green on the King’s Road in Chelsea, London as a contribution to the 2012 Chelsea Fringe. Kendra is a graduate of the MA Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich.
River Thames Flower Festival Pageant for Chelsea Fringe 2013
Today’s Royal Jubilee Pageant on the Thames was a useful trial run for the 2013 Chelsea Fringe Flower Festival Pageant, proposed for 2013. The lessons to learn are
- Best not to have the whole event on one very wet day
- The boats definitely need more flowers than today’s event – Union Jacks are no substitute
- Music is a great addition
- Dressing up a commercial barge for the royal party is kinda undignified
So here are my suggestions for the 2013 Chelsea Fringe event
- The royal party should travel from Westminster to open the Chelsea Flower Show in the new royal barge Gloriana (seen leading the procession on the left photo, above (and also in the photo below)
- Flower barge events should take place each day.
- One or more blooming boats should travel with flood tide each day from the Pool of London to Chelsea. This would be as popular with tourists as the changing of the guard in the Mall and Buckingham Palace.
Image courtesy DC07703
Floating Forest garden design for the 2012 Chelsea Fringe Festival
In rich soil, forest trees will flourish for a century, sheltering fauna and flora. Then they can serve humans for centuries to come. For the 2012 Chelsea Fringe, 600 discs of sliced pine forest have floated from Canada to London’s Portobello Dock. We welcome them.
The Floating Forest Garden was sponsored by Quebec’s Grand-Métis International Garden Festival (220 miles north of Quebec City). The festival is near Reford Gardens (Jardins de Métis) – which were founded by Elsie Reford. The garden design is by NIPpaysage – a group of Canadian landscape architects. They came together at the Université de Montréal (in 2001) and have received many awards.
The Dock Kitchen (Portobello Docks, 344/342 Ladbroke Grove, Kensal Road, London, W10 5BU) is Stevie Parle’s West London restaurant. It overlooks the Grand Union Canal and the Tom Dixon shop is also here.
What is the style of contemporary garden design and landscape architecture?
The M&G Garden, designed by Andy Sturgeon, would have received the Gardenvisit Award for ‘Best in Show‘, but for the designer’s crackpot explanation. Here is the Telegraph’s account of what he said: ‘The M&G Garden’ 2012, a ‘New English’ garden harking back to the Arts and Crafts movement, but with a modern-day twist. Featuring monolithic blocks of stone, a 98ft free-form ‘energy wave’ sculpture and a mix of formal, asymmetrical designs and informal cottage-garden planting, the garden truly reflects the values of M&G.’
Artists have been much better at naming styles and Wiki gives the following for the contemporary period:
Contemporary art – present
Toyism 1992 – present
Digital art 1990 – present
Postmodern art – present
Modernism – present
New realism 1960 –
Performance art – 1960s –
Fluxus – early 1960s – late-1970s
Conceptual art – 1960s –
Graffiti 1960s-
Junk art (adde) 1960s –
Psychedelic art early 1960s –
Lyrical Abstraction mid-1960s –
Process art mid-1960s – 1970s
Arte Povera 1967 –
Photorealism – Late 1960s – early 1970s
Land art – late-1960s – early 1970s
Post-minimalism late-1960s – 1970s
Installation art – 1970s –
Mail art – 1970s –
Neo-expressionism late 1970s –
Metarealism – 1970 -1980, Russia
Figuration Libre early 1980s
Metaphorical realism
Young British Artists 1988 –
Rectoversion 1991 –
Transgressive art
Synaesthesia events
Neoism 1979
Deconstructivism
Battle Elephants 1984
Massurrealism 1992 –
Stuckism 1999 –
Remodernism 1999 –
Maximalism
ArT is free 2010-
Would any of these fit Andy Sturgeon’s garden? Well ‘postmodern’ certainly would. Readers are invited to suggest classifications.
‘Classifying Andy’ is part of a wider problem: are garden designers and landscape architects totally lacking style?
Garden of Disorientation: design for the 2012 Chelsea Fringe Festival
‘Smithfield is renowned for the ghostly late-night movement of animal carcasses and more recently for the early-morning traffic of displaced revelers. Adding to the mix is this new internal garden space, the Garden of Disorientation’. I went to visit the garden on a really hot day in the course of a long cycle ride to visit other Chelsea Fringe projects. Suffering from heat disorientation, I found this intriguing space blessed me with orientation, as did a delicious drink. Deborah Nagan, of naganJohnson, designed the Garden of Disorientation for the 2012 Chelsea Fringe. The Garden of Disorientation is at 59 Charterhouse Street, Smithfield, London, EC1M from 19th May to 10 June 2012. Deborah is a graduate of the MA Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich. The Modern Garden Company was the main sponsor and supplied the excellent garden furniture: it is tough, stylish and street-worthy.
There are lots of reasons for wishing the Chelsea Fringe every success: it makes London an even more exciting city; it confirms London’s role as the world’s garden capital; it creates opportunities for landscape architects to show what wonderful things they can do for the city; it lets sponsors do really good things with their marketing budgets. We have many helpful suggestions!
So COME ON EVERYONE: the Chelsea Fringe has 100 projects in 2012: LETS MAKE IT 1000 PROJECTS IN 2013. Anyone unlucky enough not to be in London from 19th May to 10th June 2012 can do the London Gardens Walk. It is open on every day of every year.
London Gardens Walk eBook: a free gift for Gardenvisit.com readers & the Chelsea Fringe Festival
To celebrate the start of the first Chelsea Fringe Garden Festival, Gardenvisit.com is giving away free copies of the London Gardens Walk eBook during the weekend of 19th to 20th May. It is in Kindle format and can be downloaded from any Amazon website. If you don’t have an eReader you can download an app for your Mac or PC from the Amazon site. Comments, or, better, reviews on the Amazon website will be welcome. There is also a version of the gardens walking map on Googlemaps. It aims to walk you through about 5000 years of garden history by seeing London gardens and parks and objects in the British Museum. Does the world have another city with so much garden history on view?
Download London Gardens Walk eBook from Amazon UK