Growing with pride over this plot
Diarmuid talks us through the story behind his Silver-Gilt medal winning Harrods British Eccentrics Garden which wowed the crowds at the Chelsea Flower Show
Developing the Harrods British Eccentrics Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show has been my favourite project to date.
It included so many aspects of the things I love, from gardening, selecting trees, model making and working with illustrators, to exploring eccentricity and injecting a sense of fun back into the outdoors.
My brief from Harrods was very clear – they wanted a garden which reflected their grounding in Britain and their love of its London heritage.
I was thrilled – and challenged. Others had a record of creating stylish British gardens. I didn’t.
So, after the briefing meeting last June, I had a week of both exhilaration (the joy of returning to Chelsea) and trepidation. What was I going to create that represented both the clients’ aspirations and what I believe in? I wandered around London with this delicious dilemma. Would I sell out and create the expected Chelsea norm, bagging a bling medal and revelling in the chance to show off a colourful flower border? Or was there a way of interpreting the brief which would live up to the requirements of the clients, but also allow it to be a garden I wholly believed in? Heath Robinson provided the answer – the early 20th century cartoonist and designer of fantastically complicated machines beloved by Brits, who was talented, humorous, fun and concerned with how people lived their lives inside and out. And so the garden designed itself. As it did, another long-term influence came into my head. In 1951, for the Festival of Britain, Guinness created a clock which fascinated people. It put on a performance every quarter of an hour which delighted spectators. So popular was it that the company made seven of these clocks which travelled around the UK, Ireland and America for 20 years.
I’d always loved the notion and decided our garden would perform and hopefully captivate in a similar manner.
I began with who I thought would live and garden in my plot.
My imagined client is a man from the home counties who likes the finer things in life and possesses a great sense of inventiveness.
He dreams up wacky ideas in his battered corrugated iron shed, makes wooden models of them and finally incorporates the creations in his pint-sized plot.
He invites the vicar and the dowager Duchess for gin fizz on Sundays at 4pm. They sit at the circular garden table on the terrace and are entertained by movements, actions and surprises.
His garden is gently dramatic, theatrical, colourful and fun. It’s a place of gardening, craft and performance planned as an amusing genteel Eden, one that inspires some wonder and mirth.
It’s popping with ideas and surprises, somewhat haphazard in execution and is planned as a place to invite friends and children. It is intended to gently grab attention and seduce with smiles.
The process of creating a Chelsea garden becomes an obsession. You spend every waking and sleeping moment thinking about it, imagining every square centimetre in your head, expanding elements before refining them.
You imagine the empty plot, you think through the steps of the build, you try to view the garden from a visitor’s point of view.
And then you refine, refine and refine... right up to the moment that the garden is revealed to the press.
It’s intense. Nineteen days of decamping to London, putting your life on hold and being single-minded.
The garden was designed to inspire a sense of fun and wonder. It was deliberately playful and cartoonish in nature and it was my small tribute to the many illustrators whose skills I use or enjoy.
My planting style and backdrop of trees and folly were exaggerated to enhance a theatrical feeling.
The surprise to visitors and viewers was the eight mechanical actions which put on a brief and humorous show.
Every quarter of an hour, our British Eccentric plot engaged in a short performance. Box balls set amid floral drifts began to bob up and down in carefully choreographed movements. Conical bay trees twirled.
The circular beds, overflowing with colour, danced around the structure and small window boxes packed with Icelandic poppies rose from the ground and travelled to the first- floor windows.
To the left of the structure, a circular flip table revealed a hidden sundial. On the other side, a domed topiary specimen was trimmed by the mechanical shears. And several times a day, we literally raised the roof!
We had a wonderful time showing our Harrods garden to visitors. The reaction was overwhelming.
My dream was that it would make people smile. And it certainly did.