“I’m addicted to Chelsea”
In his 20th year of designing show gardens, gold-medal winner CHRIS BEARDSHAW shares the secrets behind his dazzling planting schemes
Gold medal-winning designer Chris Beardshaw shares his insights
With no fewer than 11 RHS gold medals for his show gardens, Chris Beardshaw has a rare design talent largely unmatched by his peers. Thanks to his voluptuous, romantic plant combinations he’s a regular recipient of the coveted People’s Choice award too. This year he’s teamed up with Morgan Stanley again to create a garden for child protection charity, the NSPCC (above). Despite his many accomplishments, Chris remains one of the most charming, modest and popular TV gardeners you could ever hope to meet...
You’ve been designing show gardens for 20 years. What drives you? Undoubtedly it’s addiction. You get the chance to create the perfect picture, immediately. As gardeners we’re all fabulously impatient, and with a show garden, once you’re on site, you have the ability to produce your vision really quickly. You’re instantly able to recognise what does and doesn’t work and then refine it, so it’s a really good learning exercise. You might go in with a preferred list of plants, but once you get to the show the whole thing changes and everything becomes amplified. The plants do things and have conversations with other plants you wouldn’t expect them to have. That’s the fun side of it.
How would you describe your planting style? I did an article for a German magazine recently and they described it as ‘painterly’. They said that I use stabs of colour for an effect that’s almost pixelated. But it’s not a conscious thing.
Is it difficult to focus on the detail at Chelsea? Yes. There’s a great glee when the lorry-load of plants arrives and there’s this
Plants have conversations with other plants that you wouldn’t expect them to have
constant sense of urgency with which everyone seems to operate. What I try and do with my planting team [Nick and Dave] is deliberately go into our own space and ignore everything that’s going on around us. There are moments when I’ve created gardens on Main Avenue that I’ve been so absorbed in thinking through every possible planting permutation that after 20 minutes or so I’ve looked up and suddenly surprised myself that I’m in the middle of Chelsea Flower Show.
How has Chelsea changed in the past 20 years? No doubt expectations are much higher now in terms of the quality of the design and planting schemes, and the ambition of the designers is much greater. Also I think it’s only in the last few years there’s been a return to a mix of different garden styles. Eight to ten years ago everyone was taking plants from the same suppliers and getting all their ideas from the same design book.
Can you remember your earliest successes? The first garden we did that made a bit of a splash was probably our Boveridge House garden (2006). We took a snapshot of the garden we’d been restoring to Chelsea on an absolute shoestring and I don’t think the RHS believed we would pull it off. It was a celebration of arts and crafts herbaceous borders at a time when Main Avenue was full of architecture, sculpture and concrete. I remember standing in the rain and having a phone call from the RHS saying: “Please can you do something about the crowds in front of your garden?” Everyone was enthralled to see a garden that had plants in it and a bit of atmosphere.
Is there a trend at the moment? I think there’s still an awful lot of concrete and rather dotty planting. That’s not a criticism. I can admire it, but that’s not the way I like to do things. To be honest there’s very little opportunity to walk around the show ground to see what other people are doing. I might know where the entrance is and the toilets, and the coffee bar, but that’s pretty much my experience of Chelsea – certainly during the build up. And then once the garden goes live you’re pretty much on the garden the whole time. Last year, of six days at the show, I spent four days watering.
Who’s on your Chelsea planting team? I plant with two guys, Nick and Dave. I’ve known them for many years and we absolutely trust one another. So, I might be putting a combination together and get so absorbed in it... Then I’ll stand up, turn round and look at either Nick or Dave and they’ll be frowning at me. And suddenly I realise it doesn’t work; they’ve seen something I haven’t. It’s a real delight to work like that.
How did your relationship with Morgan Stanley come about? They’d been involved with Chelsea for a few years on the corporate hospitality side and then decided to upscale and produce a garden. My wife Frances and I went to talk to them and what appealed to me was that they had a very real reason for being there – every project was genuine. The first garden we did was the Healthy Cities garden (2015), which was transferred into an East End community project in Poplar. The primary school benefitted from the plants and some of the structural pieces from our National Youth Orchestra garden (2016). With the Great Ormond Street Hospital garden (2015) they wanted to create a permanent legacy and made a commitment to help maintain it. It also triggered staff interest in a gardening club; I love the fact these gardens can act as a catalyst to create something more.
What’s your design process? Scattergun, I suppose. The whole project starts off as a series of scribbles and sketches – an opportunity to explore and take key words from discussions with the partner or client. Then I try to graphically represent them. I keep a small sketchbook where I’ll draw a quick rectangle and then a squiggle that becomes a path and then a shape over here that becomes planting. These little thumbnail sketches are so quick; 90% of them might be absolute garbage but somewhere, buried, will be perhaps something you can extract.
Are you visually minded? I was thrown out of art at school! I desperately wanted to do art but in those days it wasn’t considered sufficiently academic. So I was made to do geology instead. Which, with hindsight, wasn’t a bad thing. But I’ve always scribbled and sketched and looked at things. I think looking is the most important skill for any gardener – the ability to look and understand what you’re looking at and why it has an emotional effect on you.
How has your design style evolved? Inevitably it’s naïve when you start, especially with a show garden. There can be very few people who would ever look at their first piece of work and think God that’s a genius at work! Most of us look at our early gardens with a slight air of embarrassment. And so it becomes a learning process, learning new plants, new combinations, new ways of doing things. I think I’ve become more structural in the way my gardens go together, relying on one or two structural pieces, then making a tapestry of other plants to support that structure. And also the design is crisper I think.
What’s your garden like at home? A disaster, largely! If you miss two or three weeks in early spring, you never catch up. And so for the last four years of doing Chelsea, my own garden really has become somewhat neglected. I mean it’s serviceable, but I’d never open it to the public.
Do you dream of opening your home garden to the public? I can’t think of anything worse! It’s bad enough listening to what people have to say about my Chelsea show gardens! However, I do love standing in the background with a hosepipe watering the plants, just listening. The vast majority of comments are really quite flattering but I never take that praise for granted.
What sparked your interest in garden design? I stumbled into it by accident. I was working as a Saturday boy in a nursery where I would bring the plants up in trays and put them on the sales bench. And then one day the nursery owner asked me to look after the shop while he went off for lunch. I started to take the plants out of their trays and create something a bit more ‘gardeneseque’. To my delight we sold everything on that bench.
What’s the greatest challenge you’ve ever faced at Chelsea? With our garden for Arthritis UK (2013) we had a bespoke glass structure being made in Ireland. We’d ordered and paid for it three months earlier but on the day it was supposed to arrive, Frances rang the factory to find the line was dead. It turned out the company had gone bust. That’s when my old friend Nick
I’ve always scribbled and sketched and looked at things... looking is the most important skill
Knowles from DIY SOS came to the rescue. I think he was on holiday at the time and probably had to put down his pina colada to go through his phone book! But with about five days’ notice, one of his contacts managed to put the whole thing together for us and ship it up to Chelsea.
Are you proud of your medal successes? Certainly in the early days winning a gold medal was our sole focus. But with maturity comes the realisation that what’s more important is the quality of the message you’ve been able to convey and whether you feel comfortable with it. There is an element of vanity I suppose. If someone else likes your garden, whose opinion you respect, it’s really something. Last year, Peter Seabrook came onto the garden with a tear in his eye: you have to create something pretty good to get Peter Seabrook emotional!