Tag Archives: Jo Thompson

RHS Chelsea sneak peek

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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mandggarden

The M&G Garden, Chelsea 2015

It’s that time of year again…

Is it my imagination, or does the RHS Chelsea Flower Show come round more quickly each season? Maybe it’s just that I’ve been talking about it more, and earlier, than usual: I have the challenge of leading a tour group around the show for HF Holidays next year. Wish me luck. Fortunately it will be a small and select group and since I know Chelsea better than many – this will be my 10th year there – hopefully we’ll find a way around the crowds (as far as is possible anyway!)

Tickets went on sale to RHS members a few weeks ago and will be available to the public from 1 December. And to whet your appetite, the RHS has just released details of what you’re likely to see. It looks as if it’ll be a cracker of a show…

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Cleve West’s design for the M&G Garden

Cleve West is back with the sponsor’s garden, M&G. What a welcome return. It was nice of him to give Dan a go (wouldn’t it be a clash of the Titans to have them both at Chelsea at the same time) but he was missed. The garden is an homage to Exmoor: I am certain to fall in love with it as Exmoor is just a few miles from my front door and speaks to my heart like few other landscapes. There is a lot of oak.

Diarmuid Gavin is also back: love him or loathe him, he never fails to cause a stir. I interviewed him a while back and since I wasn’t a fan, was taken aback to be charmed sockless. He was absolutely delightful. Something to do with mischievous Irish twinkles. Anyway: the garden. Totally bonkers. When I say Heath Robinson inspired it you’ll get the idea. It’s not really a garden at all: more of a giant clockwork toy with added box balls. A bit of me is horrified: a bit of me can’t wait to see it.

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Diarmuid’s Heath Robinson garden

Chris Beardshaw is the next in a bit of a star-studded line-up: always one to watch, perhaps a bit safe sometimes but assured, calm, and quietly brilliant. It’s a roof garden, with a Japanese-inspired pavilion and a woodland planting scheme: I will be taking notes as woodland is what I’m doing a lot of at the moment in both my own gardens and the ones I look after, and Chris is an inspired planting designer.

Andy Sturgeon is returning to the scene of former triumphs for the Daily Telegraph (he won Best in Show for them in 2010). Bronze sculptures as mountains (hmm…) above ‘gorges’ of meltwater I can take or leave, but the drought-tolerant planting inspired by the semi-arid landscapes of the Sierra Madre and the Andes sounds extraordinary. Maytenus, asphodelus, junipers and South African Bulbine frutescens… one for plantsmen and women everywhere.

Jo Thompson is also back on Main Avenue with her design for the Chelsea Barracks: I adore Jo’s romantic style of planting and have fallen in love with every show garden she’s ever done (and the list is lengthening year by year). This one looks like classic Jo: it’s basically a rose garden, with a nod to the Grade I listed Garrison Chapel via a stained glass window.

Matthew Wilson continues the who’s who list of designers. His bench last year was a work of art, more sculpture than seating area. Stained glass again (how does that happen? I’m sure there’s some kind of ley line operating between designers preparing for Chelsea): this time it’s York Minster, currently restoring its East Window and unveiling it just before the show, next spring. The garden is a bit of a love letter to Yorkshire, in fact: I think Matthew might be missing Harlow Carr…

And Rosy Hardy is making the leap from Pavilion to Main Avenue – and there couldn’t be a better person to do it. I’m really excited to see what she can do: her creations for Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants, her nursery, are always breathtaking. Perhaps it gets boring, winning a gold medal every year (she has 20) and you need new challenges. Anyway, she’s taken the River Test in Hampshire as her inspiration: another place that’s dear to my heart, as bits of my family still live in that part of Hampshire and I’ve always loved the chalky, glass-clear Test meandering through the fields. Intriguingly, she’s ‘inviting visitors to take a walk through a dried-up chalk stream’; famously you’re never allowed onto Chelsea gardens, so this may be figurative, but we can hope…

There are 16 large show gardens in all, so I could go on further about Hugo Bugg’s Jordan-inspired arid garden, or James Basson’s perfumer’s garden (can’t wait for that one: I adore everything James does). But you’ll just have to go along and see them for yourself. I may yet have to write another post about what’s coming up in the Pavilion and indeed the artisan gardens as there are at least two things I’m jigging up and down on the spot about: but that’s for tomorrow. It’s going to be a great Chelsea!

Postcard from Japan: The home team

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in design

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No doubt the home supporters among you have been wondering how the Brits got on.

There were two gardens from British designers at the Gardening World Cup, by Jo Thompson and Richard Miers, both quite different interpretations of the peace theme.

Actually it’s slightly cheating including Jo in the British contingent as she was representing Italy (James Basson, too, is a candidate for the Brit team, being an Englishman who lives in France). She comes from Italian stock, so she’s allowed to defect temporarily, but she’s on our side really.

Anyway, Jo won a silver medal (equalling her medal from last year’s show) for her stone-arched garden, taking its inspiration directly from what happened at Nagasaki almost 70 years ago.

Richard, making his first show garden here (now that’s a baptism of fire if ever there was one) was awarded bronze for his very English garden that simply embodied the everyday peace we all feel when we kick back and relax of an evening in a beautiful garden.

I thought I’d shut up for once and let them talk about it in their own words.

 
Jo Thompson: The Butterfly Effect

“The garden is a direct response to a visit last year that we made to the Nagasaki Peace Museum… It really sunk home quite how important this message [of peace] is.

“What stayed with me were the images of these atomic shadows, which are the remnants of people who were essentially vapourised by the bomb. The people have disappeared but their shadows still remain on the concrete walls: you’ve got somebody sitting waiting for a bus, a ladder with a man up it going about his daily business – and all of that is just spine-tinglingly awful and it does make your blood run cold.

“Then next to these shadows were some wooden window shutters which had survived, and onto them there had been imprinted the shadow of the acer leaves on the tree that had stood in front of them, and it was beautiful, the most intricate pattern.

“And I found myself standing in front of it thinking, well this is beautiful but in fact it’s come from something so ugly. And I wanted to use that.

“So that was the first idea – and then as we walked out of the museum we were met by a host of butterflies. It was extraordinary – we came out from this place of gloom and were just met by them flying around, their fragility contrasting with the sadness of the place we’d just been.

“So I’ve designed a space that has rendered walls for shadows, it’s a very plain, simple floor surface for shadows; it has arches in it to frame shadows, and plants that attract butterflies.”

Richard Miers: Serenity

“It’s a garden to entertain in: to get people to sit down and have a meal and discuss and talk, aiming for peace and tranquillity.

“The theme of the whole show was gardens for peace  – my interpretation was peace within oneself, which you get being out of doors in a nice garden with wildlife all around you, the sound of the running rill – it all just helps you bring peace to yourself.

“The Japanese love asymmetry, and Europeans tend to like symmetry, and I wanted to show them what an English town garden could look like.

“I wanted to bring elements of water, I wanted to bring in the sun, represented in Emily Young’s sculpture, and show them how an English herbaceous border would be put together but using Japanese flowers.

“It’s getting the rhythm around the garden, having the space to breathe between the flowers which I thought was important.”