PLANTS DONATED TO LONDON HOSPITAL WHITE FLOWER ARBOR

A new park, dubbed ‘Sponge Park’ for the ways in which it helps to tackle flooding has opened in east Manchester. Designed by landscape architects BDP, West Gorton Community Park includes features such as swales planted with aquatic vegetation to help capture excess water, and rain gardens that contain plants such as Rodgersia pinnata that can handle being waterlogged. The design has three distinct areas: a woodland area with timber play features; a biodiverse meadow with orchard trees and picnic tables; and a garden area with space for events and community growing. bdp.com

Robert Myers Associates has produced the landscape masterplan for a sustainable development at King’s College, Cambridge. The scheme, by architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, provides 84 new homes for students and Fellows, and the landscape design creates a central communal space, crossed by diagonal paths, a generous lawn with linear landform, and a terraced amphitheatre. The rear gardens are more informal, with a woodland garden created around existing trees. A shared allotment garden is planned for the sunny southwestern corner. robertmyers-associates.co.uk

RHS ambassador Jamie Butterworth and his team have planted out a scented garden for staff of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital using more than 1,000 donated plants. Multistem trees, and topiary domes and pyramids have transformed a paved inner courtyard alongside new beds filled with flowering perennials, including roses, dianthus, irises, alliums, lupins and salvias, and scented, evergreen shrubs, such as Sarcococca hookeriana. The donated plants had all been grown by Form Plants for the Amaffi Garden at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. butterworthhorticulture.co.uk

Tokyo-based APL Design Workshop’s has created an unusual raised foyer for an open-air theatre in Kurobe, Japan. Known as the White Flower Arbor, the tree-ringed pavilion serves both as a theatre lobby where audiences can gather between performances and a backstage area for the actors.

Oak and cedar trees support the corrugated roof, with further support against the weight of winter snow provided by nine steel beams that double as pillars to which tables can be attached. At night, these tables are lit from below. apldw.co.jp