The Most Imaginative Garden At This Year's Chelsea Flower Show, Designed On A Shoestring, Celebrated Colour And Texture, Evanescent Architecture And Anglo-French Cooperation

Architectural Review, The, July, 2000 by Violet Gore

The Chelsea Flower Show is one of London's most famous annual events. Show gardens intended to demonstrate the creativity and skill of garden designers have become a larger part of the show getting more lavish and costly by the year, but not necessarily more inventive. They are not always easy to see. The frontages are too narrow and the plots are often too deep. And whereas television cameras are allowed free access to roam and probe, and even hover overhead, the wretched spectators must put up with a fixed and often restricted viewpoint.

So it was intelligent of the designers of this Gold Medal winning garden (landscape architect, Ryl Nowell, collaborating with the architects Christopher Proctor and Fernando Rihl) to treat their plot like a steeply raked stage set. Spectators could not only see everything from the stalls, as it were, but the more intrepid among them could even wander across the stage itself. The 12m x 12m plot tapered towards the rear and was made up of a series of terraces, subdivided into rhomboid shaped beds. Down the middle ran a stream, representing the English Channel and across the stream lay a steel mesh bridge, symbolizing Anglo-French collaboration. At each side of the bridge stood two glass kiosks in which you could shelter from the almost incessant rain and enjoy the textures and colours of species cabbages unexpectedly allied with alliums, irises, lavenders and exotic grasses.

Planting by Rhyl Nowell and her French opposite number, Baroness Laurence de Bosmelet, evoked the spirit of their respective gardens: the Cabbages and Kings garden in Sussex, and the Chateau de Bosmelet's kitchen garden in Normandy which specializes in coloured cabbages.