The Daily Telegraph Garden, designed by Andy Sturgeon, scooped the Best in Show award at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. I was surprised when I visited it yesterday: I thought I would despise it. I feared those harsh rusty girder-like screens, and the colours in the planting scheme.
But I adored this garden, and its success is testament to Sturgeon’s extraordinary design skills. More than any other garden in the show, this plot used plants to stun. That’s plants, not semi-precious stones, or fake grass. Those verbascums and californian poppies didn’t shout and scream as I thought they might: instead they formed lovely accents in the garden against the deeper, earthy colours.
Sturgeon picked his inspiration for this garden from the Mediterranean, and there are some lovely colours, textures and materials in this garden which reflect this.
One of the things I loved the most about this garden, apart from the sing-song colours, was that it had no obvious focal point, and no obvious central route. You had to explore the whole garden for yourself before you had seen it all. Sturgeon says this is supposed to represent the way life works out: with lots of different routes, and lots of lovely consequences.
So what ideas can you steal from this garden? I’m pinching those beautiful verbascums, and Sturgeon’s fearlessness over bold colour. And I’ll be stealing that idea of a garden as a journey rather than something you can take in all at once. If that sounds terribly pretentious, all I mean is in my next garden I’ll steer away from making everything obvious from the very moment you enter the plot. That’s all.
All images copyright Royal Horticultural Society.
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