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Postcard from Chelsea: Best in Show

23 Tuesday May 2017

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The M&G Garden, James Basson

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I can’t help feeling a bit smug about this year’s winner of Best in Show. I have been saying for quite some time that I thought James Basson was destined for great things: I first met him in Japan back in 2012, when he was doing the Gardening World Cup and created a fine, thoughtful and delicately judged garden based on the Wilfred Owen poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Even back then I knew he was doing something rather different.

I have loved everything he’s done ever since. Last year’s garden for L’Occitane recreated a Provence landscape with breathtaking attention to detail and was, for my money, head and shoulders above the rest (the RHS judges, sadly, didn’t agree with me).

Which is why it is a little painful for me to confess that this year’s garden is not, for me, a favourite. I hope he won’t mind me saying that I found the strongly geometric hard landscaping, meant to evoke a Maltese quarry, overwhelming and over-dominant. I think it’s something to do with the crisply-cut, cuboid, modernist shapes. There was a lot of rock in his L’Occitane garden, after all, but there it complemented the planting. This swamps it.

And that’s a shame, as the plants themselves are quite remarkable. Typically of James’s attention to detail, each one is thoughtfully chosen and grouped to recreate particular microclimates: many are Maltese natives, rarely seen on these shores.

These are austere wildflowers, with none of the over-the-top prettiness of Chelsea. It’s a harsh, uncompromising landscape which perfectly evokes the dry, edge-of-existence environment that is as fragile as it gets. It is brave, for Chelsea (especially in the sponsor’s garden), and makes no concessions to crowd-pleasing. It is, in fact, what James Basson does best.

So look past the overly-geometric, jarringly modernist stonework which I wish had more rough edges, more chaos, more wildness; and concentrate instead on the gaunt, stark dignity of the plants between. For that is where the real truth of this garden lies, and that is why James is such a very special and very different kind of designer whose moment in the spotlight has, at last, arrived.

Postcard from Chelsea #2: Best in Show

24 Tuesday May 2016

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Well: Andy Sturgeon has done it again with his dinosaur-inspired creation for the Daily Telegraph. It’s huge, sculptural, dramatic, monumental…. and…. oh dear. Not my kind of thing at all.

I really like Andy’s designs as a rule: the last time he won, in 2010, was with a garden I still talk about today. It had a similarly strong design, with sparse, beautiful, well-considered planting, and a haunting sense of atmosphere. It left you with the kind of images that stay on the retina for years afterwards.

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Now there’s a trip hazard waiting to happen…

This one may stay in my mind for all the wrong reasons. The bold design was, for me, just a bit too bold, a bit too in-yer-face. It kept pulling my eye away from the extraordinary planting I’d rather be looking at, full of beauties I’d never come across before. When you have star plants like this, it’s a crime to have your attention dragged away so you can look at a load of white limestone instead.

Anyway. What do I know. It was all undeniably very ambitious: Andy has shouldered the task of telling the history of the world in a garden, no less, from dinosaurs onwards, bronze stegosaurus plates and all.

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For me, though, it was the plants which swung it: my, but they’re special. Their names are like a rollcall of the rare and exotic and sent me scurrying for my plant encyclopedias: Anizoganthus (kangaroo paw) and gaunt, sparse Corokia x virgata I’m familiar with, but the tufty red spires of Echium russicum, grassy Poa labillardierei and Ephedra fragilis, delicate Bulbine frutescens… all had me rifling feverishly through the pages.

The effect was so ethereal, otherworldly, alien: a world of sparse, twisted stems and delicate, shy flowers in silvers and tangerine oranges, so unfamiliar you could believe a stegosaurus might walk around the corner at any minute. It convinced better, in fact, than any amount of firepits and paving.

Postcard from Chelsea: Best Show Garden

19 Tuesday May 2015

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Anyone who has ever visited Chatsworth will recognise the influence of its towering, supersized rockery – more of a small cliff, really – in Dan Pearson’s extraordinary garden, his first since 1996. The rocks dominate the design – but almost scuppered it, too, when Thames Water descended on site and halted all work three days into the build. There is a sewer running under this section of the Chelsea Flower Show – who knew? – and stacking several rocks the size of a small car on top was in danger of cracking it (to say nothing of the huge willow trees, which alone weighed two tonnes each).

The Crocus team hastily rethought their design, painstakingly pre-constructed at their Windlesham, Surrey, nurseries, subtracted one willow tree and moved the rocks over a bit: and the result is a garden that’s among the most original and confident show gardens I’ve seen at Chelsea. It’s a masterclass in naturalistic planting and how to create a sense of place even in the smallest spaces. This is one of those game-changing gardens whose influence we’ll still be referring to many years from now.