Chelsea, naturally How to get the natural look with long grass and a mix of wildflowers
Naturalistic gardens have come to the fore at Chelsea in recent years. Adrian Thomas wonders if they have real wildlife value – or are they just a romantic illusion?
Back in 2015 visitors flocked to Chelsea Flower Show to find a piece of the Derbyshire Peak District, complete with massive boulders, ancient oaks and tinkling trout stream, that looked as though it had been there forever. It was a show garden with no herbaceous beds, no flowers, no lawn, no sculptures, no posh pavilions. This was Dan Pearson's Chatsworthinspired garden, and it moved some people to tears. A perfect piece of nature had been recreated in SW1; a new standard had been set for the style of garden dubbed ‘naturalistic’. But if a garden looks natural, is it necessarily good for nature? And, can this new naturalism be made to work in our own gardens? After all, we’d love our own garden visitors to burst into tears, but for all the right reasons, of course!
Getting the natural look
For some people, a ‘naturalistic’ garden is a precise facsimile of a natural, unspoilt wild habitat, containing only the plant species you’d find in the original, and looking like no-one had ever set foot there. For others, it’s a bit less exacting, more a garden that has the essence of a natural environment, but which retains the gardener’s mark and a sense of human control. In essence, the naturalistic garden is the antithesis of the formal garden. It’s relaxed, without symmetry or regimentation, a step into wild countryside where native plants intermingle and where decay is allowed its place rather than being removed. Importantly, a naturalistic garden isn’t one that has simply been abandoned. A garden left to run amok quickly spirals into chaos, spawning attacks of unwanted ‘triffids’ such as bindweed and nettles. In naturalism there may be wildness, but with balance and harmony, too.
Naturalism at Chelsea
Garden designers have been using naturalism at Chelsea for years. It’s only the name that’s relatively new. For example, Peter Dowle’s L’Occitane Immortelle Garden in 2012 was an evocation of the dry Corsican landscape; even further back than that, Peter worked with his father Julian on the Yorkshire Alive with Opportunity garden in 2003, with its little stone bridge and stream through the meadows. Then there was Geoff Whiten’s A Waterside Retreat in 2000, with its lush planting on the edge of a lake. However, a typical technique for bringing naturalism to Chelsea has been to create a tableau of an abandoned manmade landscape into which nature is returning. For example, HMP Leyhill’s Time the Healer Garden in 2000 had wildflowers invading an old industrial landscape, as did the Greening of Industry garden in 1992 by Paul Cooper. Oh, the romance of the gently decaying ruin! But back in the 1990s, new ideas for working with nature were coming to the fore, from German and Dutch gardeners who were experimenting with new perennial planting schemes, and from home-grown talent such as our own Beth Chatto. At Chelsea, these ideas could be seen in Julie Toll’s Forest Garden in 1996 with its wildflower paths through the woods. You can even trace some elements of naturalism back to Gertrude Jekyll 100 years ago; it’s interesting that so much of naturalism seems to have been inspired by female gardeners. In his book No Nettles Required, Dr Ken Thompson concludes that the perfect wildlife garden should have hedges, a pond, some long grass, a log pile, several trees, lots of different plants and shrubs, and little or no bare ground. Well, that’s naturalistic gardens through and through. You can imagine the unbroken food chains, from soil creatures to butterflies, moths, bees,
bats and birds that would develop. In the absence of definitive scientific studies, naturalistic gardens have so many wildlife-friendly features that, in general, they must be great for biodiversity. That doesn’t mean that other types of garden design can’t be wildlife-friendly – they just have to work a bit harder to achieve it. The reason I believe people found Dan Pearson’s Chatsworth Garden so emotional was that it evokes nostalgia for a simpler way of life. More and more research is showing the health benefits of being closer to nature. In a naturalistic garden, you feel you can let your hair down, run barefoot along grassy paths, and then flop in the grass exhausted but happy. In our increasingly urbanised world, maybe we will come to need that more and more. And when you find it, you too might even shed a tear, of sheer joy.