SYRIAN GARDEN BRINGS BREATH OF FRESH AIR TO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW
Refugees in northern Iraq camp inspire award-winning exhibit at glittering London event,
It’s the wealthy and well-established people here who learn about conditions for the people in the camps and make a connection to over there JULIET MILLICAN Lemon Tree Trust
It is one of the highlights of the English social season. Nobles, middle-class enthusiasts and hard-handed professional gardeners converge on the Chelsea Flower Show for a day among lush garden displays and outlandish sculptured landscapes.
This year there was an added dimension to the annual show staged by the Royal Horticultural Society. A prize-winning garden was modelled on the refugee camps built for Syrians and Kurds in northern Iraq.
Patrons in blazers and straw hats visited the garden – which won a silver gilt medal from the judges – inspected flowers and shrubs growing from concrete breeze blocks and plastic water bottles cut in half.
A pentagonal Damascene fountain sat at the centre of the display. The drought-tolerant flower beds reflected the lack of water in the arid area where the camps have been established.
There was a shaded area where a family might gather to take some respite in cooler air.
Fielding the queries of the curious horticulturalists was Juliet Millican, who has been involved with the refugees in Domiz, a former Iraqi army base near Dohuk, since 2015.
“I wanted to bring together two different worlds and I think we’ve managed to do it,” Ms Millican said. “It’s the wealthy and well-established people here who learn about conditions for the people in the camps and make a connection to over there.”
“I hope it’s not an overtly political thing because, after all, what we are doing is responding to the needs of the camp residents beyond the most basic.
“It’s showing the patrons here the methods used by the gardeners to grow their flowers or their food in very harsh conditions, and to enjoy some of the shade to make life more tolerable when it’s baking hot.”
A British charity, the Lemon Tree Trust, took the gamble to stage the garden at the Chelsea event. It recruited Tom Massey, an up-and-coming designer, to execute the concept.
“Mr Massey travelled to Domiz in March to learn from the locals about the plants they favour and incorporate their aesthetic into his work,” Ms Millican said.
Maya Youssef, a Syrian musician, played the qanun at the opening on the show’s Main Avenue. Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Theresa May took time to sit among the poppies and fig trees listening to Mr Massey’s ideas about the garden.
Mr Massey paid tribute to Sami Youssef, a Syrian botanist who works for the trust in Iraq, as his guide to local gardening habits and someone who opened up the meaning of the pastime within the local culture.
“Meeting Sami really underlined that a refugee camp is filled with ordinary people,” he said. “Journalists, designers, architects, botanists, farmers, teachers, decorators – all just doing their best to survive.”
Colm Joseph, another designer who volunteered on the garden stand, said the patrons who stopped at the stall had interacted at two levels.
“There is gardening at its most basic, planting seeds in breeze blocks for example, and there is the essence of gardening with the months of cultivation and the design centred around the Islamic-inspired central fountain and its cooling effect,” Mr Joseph said.
Ms Millican said the Trust was holding parallel competitions for gardeners in six separate camps in Iraq. It helps those who want to establish flowers and herbs they may have had in their home gardens in Syria.
It does so by handing out crisis packs to families and helps them to make raised beds for cultivation.
“There are many different approaches that people take,” Ms Millican said. “One wealthy man has filled a plot with roses and decorative displays that remind him of the garden that he fled.
“Others, like the Yazidi families, have a very different connection with the native world and are less interested in the decorative. They want to grow something to do with well-being and that allows them to be in the fresh air and benefit from a green space.”
The English charity first started work among the prisoners of war in Germany during the First World War. It has rapidly expanded in Iraq from the first toehold in Domiz.
It now has six poly-tunnels and a nursery, supplying local agriculture and the gardeners. With the expansion to six settlements, the mini-Chelsea competition it has run drew 50 entrants from across the communities.
It is not the first time a regional presence has stolen the show at Chelsea. The Founding Father, Sheikh Zayed, won the best in show award on three occasions.
The Chelsea Flower Show was a passion for Sheikh Zayed, a patron of the Royal Horticultural Society who entered for seven years, exhibiting with three different designers on the way to winning the top award.
His winning garden, a shady, enclosed space, was designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole and titled Garden of the Desert. It was reported to have taken inspiration from early Islamic gardens.
Ms Millican said the spread of their projects to other camps beyond Domiz inspired her latest plans to work with more Syrian refugees by opening an operation in a camp in Greece.
If the Chelsea Garden exhibit is to be repeated, she hopes for more competitions to be held over Skype that can draw in the refugees to the “different world” of south-west London.