Garden Design and Designers > Garden Shows and Festivals > Visiting the RHS Chelsea Flower Show > Garden designs at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008

Garden designs at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008 - a review by Tom Turner

The fashion-show aspect of Chelsea is growing. You see this in 'hemlines are up/down' style of media comment and also in the use of actors and models to animate designs. A copy of The London Paper I was given (at about 4 PM on Press Day) had a photograph of a topless model, and the headline 'Painted lady steals the show', to illustrate the Quilted Velvet Garden. It reminded me that Elma missed an opportunity in not hiring Melinda Messenger to demonstrate her natural swimming pond (see Chelsea 2005 Review). The themes noted in press comment were the rising enthusiasm for green walls, green roofs and rainwater harvesting, together with a preference for green and white, over gaudiness, as the colour themes for the Main Avenue show gardens. Two other points I noticed were the markedly improved standard of construction design and the ever-growing difference between the work of horticulturalists and that of trained landscape and garden designers. John Brookes, generously manning the Society of Garden Designers stand on Pavilion Way, agreed with this point but added that the designers must also 'know their plants'. The Landscape Institute was nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that trained landscape architects have done much of the best work on the Main Avenue. One wonders why.



John Brookes, a true pioneer of modern garden design in Britain, was on the SGD stand and Chelsea's first topless model, as published in The London Paper.



Lloyds TSB took travel as a theme and used girls in national costume to animate the design.



Garden in the Silver Moonlight, designed by Haruko Seki and Makato Saito won a Silver Medal. The design quality is superb and would surely have earned a Gold Medal - if the design had included more flowers, possibly a drift of Sacred Lotus - Nelumbo nucifera (which would have been a horticultural challenge!). It is, after all, the Chelsea Flower Show. The design was inspired by the moon observation platform at Katsura Imperial Villa. It is a pleasure to see a design which is obviously Japanese and obviously modern. Many Japanese architects, from Kenzo Tange onwards, have attempted this feat and failed.



The Laurent-Perrier Garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith won a Gold Medal and a Best in Show award. The design quality is certainly high, and the detailing is excellent, but I do not think it is as good as the same designer's 2006 entry. It is less memorable, less sensuous and rather puzzling - the designer himself describes it as 'slightly surreal'.



Cancer Research UK Garden, designed by Andy Sturgeon. The photographs are dominated by the '"thought wall" sculpture, inspired by a 1960s Mary Quant dress' - which is, in truth, rather an oddity. It detracts one's attention from the central, and best, feature of the design: rectangular pools of 'black water' which float above a white cantilevered platform, which floats above another pool of black water. The blackness comes from a pond dye which makes the water surface highly reflective.



The Daily Telegraph Garden, designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd won a Gold Medal. The design has the elegant simplicity of a large pool with intertwining ribbons of black slate and white lilies (Nymphea alba), crucially illuminated by a backdrop of bamboos with white flowers. Arabella states that her work was 'inspired by the purity of design found a Japanese garden'. Though it does not affect one's appreciation of the composition, I do not think many people will detect the Japanese connection. If the lilies and bamboos make them think of the orient, they are more likely to find a Chinese connection.



I Dream, I Seek My Garden, is a first garden design by Shao Fan. He is Chinese and has an international reputation as a sculptor and furniture maker. The aim was to design a contemporary garden which drew its inspiration from the lost gardens of the Song Dynasty, instead of from the well-known Chinese gardens of the Qing Dynasty. It is set deep into the ground, reminding us that in a hot country it is more important to avoid the sun than catch the sun. China has a long tradition of shady courtyards, some of them subterranean. For a Chelsea show garden, this creates a rare sense of enclosure. The earthen walls are calming; the peonies are brilliant; the construction (project managed by Sarah Eberle), is superb; the Gold Medal was well-earned.



The Summer Solstice garden (by Tomasso del Buono and Paul Gazerwitz) won a Silver Gilt medal with its eminently sustainable approach to the creation of a garden which is both useful and beautiful - for growing food. The use of wattles to raise the vegetables above ground level is medieval in origin, as is the determination to combine use and beauty. But the geometrical elegance of the design is altogether modern.



Musicians by the F&C Investment Trust Garden



Since most of the show gardens at Chelsea are 'all show and no go' it is a pleasure to find a garden which is very much designed for use. The Marshalls garden is designed for children's play and to illustrate this aspect, Marshalls had the good sense to bring in a troup of children who were then allowed to clamber all over, and through, the design. As Thomas Church used to say 'gardens are for people' (Gardens Are for People was published by Reinhold in 1955).



Paul Cooper, on TV, took my breath away with a claim that the Ocean to a Garden design was inspired by Carlo Scarpa. Scarpa was a brilliant designer but this is very dull 'garden'. Its like hyping some dreary doggerel with a claim to have drawn inspiration from Shakespeare. The judges showed their disdain my making it the only garden on the Main Avenue not to receive an award of any kind.