Multi-use landscapes

Just amazing walled gardens with the perfect water source at Ickworth House in Suffolk.  We have been coming to Ickworth for tens of years since my father moved nearby.  It's one of our favourite places to visit but none of us, including Dad, had ever seen this part before - that's the beauty of this magical place, it's full of hidden gems; a huge, walled vegetable garden with an immense vineyard and beautiful high-brick walled productive gardens sweeping down to the lake.  In the middle is a wonderful sun-room, high-ceilinged and isolated, with only an enormous fig for company and views of the lake, the perfect place to sit and ponder life itself.  It's obvious that these gardens had been left derelict until quite recently, but they are now buzzing with life and some have even been donated to the local school, so there is now a lively productive garden complete with quirky scarecrows standing guard.

Don't you just love beach art.  Can't beat it.  It brings back all the feelings of holiday.  Dunwich Beach, Mummy, Daddy, Daughter.  Fab!

I love this piece.  Its been sitting on the side in the utility room at my Dad's house for many a year now.  In my view, it would be just at home in an art gallery or on its own shelf in a very contemporary house, perhaps up-lit from below to exaggerate the wonderful detail work along the top edge - it would create great shadows.  It was made by my exceptionally talented stepmother, or Belle-mere as we are in the habit of calling her.  She has many artistic talents, but her pottery pieces are her best and most suitably typify her character.  Exuberant, funny, creative, daring to be different.  We are lucky to have her.  Thanks Dad!

The incredible edible Hampton Court!

I haven’t visited the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show for over 10 years.  Not something a garden designer should be proud of, but there are just so many shows to visit and I have to say, I wasn’t that taken with Hampton Court on my last visit.  I have a very limited amount of time available to catch up with the trends and the list of shows and real gardens that I want to see in my lifetime is as long as your arm, so something has to give.  I was lured this year by my friend Melissa Jolly though, a local garden designer who created one of the concept gardens, for which Hampton Court is now widely known.

Despite my reservations, I had a great day and if you are at all interested in gardening, rather than garden design (which is much more Chelsea’s remit), Hampton Court is very much the show to visit.

What I went for though was the gardens.  Hampton is a very different animal to the likes of the Chelsea Flower Show.  Chelsea is a garden design mecca; showcasing what we really ‘should’ want to have in our gardens these days, what is hot and what is around the corner in terms of styles and trends.  Hampton Court is more about widening the appeal of horticulture and gardening than providing cutting edge garden design as the main focus; the gardens on show are far more deep thinking than those at Chelsea and in the main they are looking to communicate a message rather than be uber-current.  I really like this considered approach and it’s fascinating to observe how these gardens impact on the audience as you can really stand and stare at Hampton Court, rather than being swept along by the crowd as you are at Chelsea, with barely a moment or the space to reflect and absorb what you are looking at.  This year there was a distinctly philanthropic feel to the show with a variety of charity gardens each shouting out their own message in an attempt to steal limelight.

The RHS had provided their own themes as well – an amazing Alice in Wonderland themed Scarecrow competiton for local schools provided a jolly display of weird and wonderful creations that would have been totally at home in the Lewis Carroll story, but may have been too beautiful to frighten away the birds.  The Poet’s Gardens were a little bit too abstract for my liking, poetry is such an introspective art, it’s hard to bring the essence of it out into a garden environment.

The overriding theme of the show though was edible and subsistence gardening.  Something that is going to become the focus of our gardening future.  My theory is that we are very shortly going to become acutely aware that we cannot continue to eat the way we do – fast, fatty, fakely and from far away – it’s not sustainable, it’s not affordable and it’s not local; it’s not good for you and it’s not good for this country, on many levels.  So what are the options then and how do we fit food prodution into our already crowded environments and daily lives?

The RHS provided ample food for thought at the show with their ‘Grow Your Own’ Garden and marquee.  A veritable feast of edible delights to feed the mind, the eye and the stomach.  It was a beautiful display and showed the diversity of what you can grow and how, from space saving espaliered fruit trees to vegetables suitable for a shady corner.  And it definitely wasn’t reminiscent of the allotments of bygone years, with a few sprouts dotted here and there.  It was a proper garden; organised, beautiful and abundantly productive.  It did take pride of place in the show though, a whopping 1,850sqm of space in fact, not the smallest of gardens, but hugley informative and educational all the same.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was my favourite garden of the show.  The Burgon and Ball ‘5-a-Day’ garden was one of the smaller gardens.  The designers crammed a delightful garden into a tiny space, but did it with style and wit too.  The result was a charming garden on many levels; they used the floor, the walls and the stairs (including under them!).  Every single bit of available space was used efficiently and the attention to detail was exquisite.  Rainwater storage tanks were fitted in under the steps which you would not have known were there had the designers not allowed for a couple of subtle portholes for show-goers to peek through.  A wonderful pull-out potting table and compost bins were integrated under the steps too, using up every inch of space.  Herbs and salad leaves were grown as green walls; the ‘deep bed system’ which allows for closer growing proximities and therefore bigger yields for crops was used on the floor as raised beds and in planters on the edge of the stairs to double up as a balustrade and prevent you falling into the garden below!  You could even eat the table – it featured a central trough sunk into its middle which was planted with herbs and edible flowers so you could dress your own salad at the table!  This was a gem of a garden which deserved its Gold Medal award and should really have been Best in Show.

If you haven’t been before, I would really urge you to visit the show next year.  Not only is it a festival of delights and dramas but it also highlights the importance of gardening in an attractive and simple way and if you are at all frightened of getting your hands dirty and don’t know how to start off in the garden, the RHS has developed the educational side of things over the years and this has grown into a non-intimidating, friendly and fun part of the show.

Get it in your diary for 2012!  

Jamie Dunstan's 'Winds of Change' gold-medal winning garden
Photography by Nicola Stocken-Tompkins

Chelsea – thoughts to the future

As if the current economic situation isn’t terrifying enough for many of us, Joe Swift’s comments on the BBCs coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, that if food imports were stopped tomorrow our food supplies would run out in just 4 days, could have been the nail in the proverbial coffin.  And this was a pertinent comment indeed as, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it I must say, the overriding theme to the show this year was sustainability.  Hurrah!  After so many years of sustainability sitting just below the surface, it is finally hitting the big-time  where it will really be brought home to us how important it is now and in the future to use the space we have efficiently and effectively to makes our lives more sustainable.  And what better time for this to happen than now, when we are all looking to save a few pennies and for our own places and plots to start working for us.

The large (size as well as budget!) show gardens aside, the show was awash with vertical gardening, home-grown edibles (fruit and veg to you and I), renewable resources and energy production, maximising use of space by connecting the home with the garden through usable garden buildings – the list could go on.  All done with a hint of style too.  It was the first time in years I felt truly inspired and excited by a Chelsea Flower Show.  Yes, the Chelsea Flower Show is a just that, a show, a performance, an abundance of daring, delighting and delving into unexplored areas of gardens and all their fabulous accoutrements and possibilities; designers are show-casing their talents  to 1) get noticed and 2) get the opportunity to put together gardens which push the boundaries of garden design as we know it and I whole heartedly embrace both these points.  It was just so refreshing to see this done with some appreciation of both the economic and environmental predicament we find ourselves in. 

My all out favourite garden was by designer Jamie Dunstan.  Entitled ‘Winds of Change’ this garden embraced the potential of a garden on a host of different levels.  Sponsored by Stockton Drilling, a pipeline company who are involved with geothermal heating and cooling systems, the link back to the company was a strong one – concentrating on building systems (this one being a garden) that will have minimal environmental impact;  for which the sponsors will be hugely thankful.  The whole garden had a character to it that shouted industrial environment but also a delicate beauty and serenity that is a garden thoughtfully and carefully put together.  The main features were an open fronted steel framed building, with integral log store, fireplace and green roof.  The flooring of this building and the garden boundaries were made up of a multitude of recycled timber, jazzed up with intermittent coloured panels –providing a common link between this inside and the outside.  The dominant feature of the garden were 6 wind turbines, cleverly engineered cooling fans that somehow, despite their dominance, seemed at home in the space.  The planting was soft and pretty, very natural and a wonderful contrast to the industrial look.  The two quite opposing styles merged beautifully to create a garden with guts and integrity and a unique style that has been missing a Chelsea for quite a while.  I just wanted to get in there and use it. 

This garden could quite easily have been created from scratch using entirely new materials, and to be honest because of the skill of its construction and the thoughtfulness of the designer, this is how it looked.  But in reality, it wasn’t.  Where possible he used existing materials to develop a new garden from old.  Even the plants were grown in his own nursery and he engineered the wind turbines himself from industrial cooling fans.

In my view, in our own gardens, we should be concentrating our efforts – looking to regenerate new from existing, old and unwanted.  Composting, chickens, growing from seed, plant sharing, installing renewable energy and so on.  This doesn’t have to mean woolly-jumper-wearing disorder and lack of style.  It can still be cool, contemporary and overwhelmingly up to date.  Chelsea showed this off with alarming accuracy this year and I can’t wait for it all to filter through to our everyday!