Garden Design and Designers > Garden Shows and Festivals > Visiting the RHS Chelsea Flower Show > Garden designs at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2009

Garden designs at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2009 - a review by Tom Turner

Rolf Harris Green Wall The 2009 Chelsea Flower Show is likely to be remembered as Credit Crunch Chelsea, because the number of Show Gardens was almost halved. But the organizers were ingenious and I doubt if many visitors noticed. I looked at the design drawings on the night before the show and thought ‘Ugh’. But the designs were a pleasant surprise. The standard of planting design was high and the standard of construction design was higher than ever.

It would be better to remember Chelsea 2009 as the Year of the Green Wall. There were a few in 2008 and stacks of them this year. We can look forward to them appearing all over London. Whether they make a useful contribution to sustainability remains an open question but, in view of their soft beauty, unimportant.

Judging the Chelsea gardens is consistently eccentric, with the three criteria being 'doing what you said you were going to do' (ie complying with your own design brief), neatness and 'style'. Each should be made subsidiary to a new Prime Criterion: DESIGN QUALITY. In 2009, the top awards went to the Swedish landscape architect Ulf Nordfjell (for The Daily Telegraph Garden), Luciano Giubbilei, an Italian garden designer, (for the Laurent-Perrier Garden) and Laurie Chetwood, a London architect, (for the Perfume Garden). The garden with our Worst in Show Award is at the foot of this page. See blog post on the Judging the Chelsea Judges, and look right for a photo of the wonderful Rolf Harris and his wife in front of a Green Wall.



The Fenchurch Garden, designed by Paul Hensey, provides a comfortable and lush outdoor room - with a green wall.



The three show gardens I liked best were, small, distinctive and just the kind of place developers should be making on urban sites with limited garden space. Above left Witan Wisdom Garden by Nicholas Dexter Above right, the Eco Chic Garden by Kate Gould

Of the larger show gardens, the best were in the now-traditional rectilinear Abstract High Modern Style. As ever, it is very popular with designers and not-so-popular with garden owners. They probably think, as I do, that it looks too commercial – too much as though it belongs to the hotels, shops and offices in which too many of us spend too much of our lives.

Above left: the The Laurent Perrier Garden by Luciano Giubbilei
Above right: the Canary Islands Spa Garden by David Cubero and James Wong



The Cancer Research garden, as in previous years, is in a class of its own: curvilinear Abstract High Modern. Design by Robert Myers. I think it symbolizes chemotherapy, radiation therapy and mutating cells. These are unusual design themes and one wonders if the hundreds of thousands of pounds might not have been spent better in laboratories - though the Chelsea Show would be a poorer place without this charity's contribution. The public sensibly voted this as their favourite garden.



A special mention must go to Sarah Eberle’s three ‘recession’ gardens – along with a bouquet of congratulations to the RHS for commissioning them. The space became available because M&S, anticipating a sharp fall in their dividend, did not want to be seen ‘squandering’ money on designer gardens. A typical Chelsea Show Garden costs £800,000. Sarah Eberle built three small gardens with an expenditure of £15,000 on labour and materials. In terms of design quality/£1, they were outstandingly the best gardens in the show – and an inspiration to all owners of front gardens.



The Daily Telegraph Garden, designed by Swedish landscape architect Ulf Nordfjell, won the Best in Show award. It is an English cottage garden reinterpreted using Swedish modernist principles.



We would have given our Worst in Show award to James May's unmentionable Plasticine Garden, but because it is unmentionable, the award goes to Leeds City Council's HESCO Garden. Designed by Leeds City Council, it looks as though it was designed in 1953 by a young man whose apprenticeship in the Parks Department was interrupted by a period of National Service. Our first reaction was that the sponsors, HESCO, must be mad to support such a project, but they are a Leeds company which makes a special gabion used as a bastion 'by military organistations including the US Army, USMC, USAF, NATO and the UN'. Unless they are worrying about Leeds dropping out from the 2010 Show, it is very hard to understand how the judges came to award this mish-mash a Silver Gilt medal.

The Perfume Garden, designed by Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins, unaccountably received a Gold Award. Though it has some planting, it is more like an advertisement outside an airport than a garden. See blog post on the Judging the Chelsea Judges. I think the man amongst the sad cypresses is Joe Swift, for his sins.