Chelsea trends What’s hot and what’s not to miss in planting and design
Chelsea is the show that wields the most influence on garden design and planting. Annie Gatti looks at this year’s dominant themes and innovations
Show garden themes at Chelsea are usually a melding of the sponsor’s ‘message’ and the designer’s often quite personal interpretation of that brief. This year many designers have envisaged their gardens as refuges or sanctuaries – from conflict, ill health, or the stresses of modern living. English-inspired gardens offer us soft perennials and grasses along with the wild flower plantings that have dominated Chelsea in recent years, with fewer box balls and more shrubs for structure. Perhaps because of a growing interest in drought-tolerant plantings, and also because several of the show gardens feature native plants from hotter climes such as Provençal France, United Arab Emirates, Australia and Lesotho, the Chelsea palette will be more striking and varied than usual. Palm trees and pomegranates, agaves and aloes, pistachio shrubs and tuberoses should provide drama, scent and colour.
There’s an exciting boldness of colour combinations across many of the gardens too, exemplified by Marcus Barnett’s saturated palette in The Telegraph Garden and the shrub-rich planting of Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier garden. Rich yellows, zingy pinks, strong reds and blues are provided by perennials such as primulas, geums, lupins and kniphofias with, weather permitting, a number of unusual annuals such as Gomphrena globosa (Beauty of Islam), Alonsoa meridianalis ‘Red’ ( The Telegraph Garden) and Papaver aculeatum( Sentebale). Earthy colours are embraced by Sarah Eberle, who is returning to Chelsea with gardens in both the Artisan and Fresh categories, and Harry and David Rich who plan to include two new varieties, Baptisia ‘Dutch Chocolate’ and Anthriscus ‘Kabin’, both supplied by Hortus Loci, in their confident meadow palette in the Cloudy Bay Garden.
Visitors will be treated to the soothing sound of falling water, tumbling from high sandstone rocks (Laurent-Perrier) and a wall-top pool ( The Telegraph Garden), down walls (Homebase Urban Retreat and Beauty of Islam), forming a circular waterfall (Personal Universe Garden) and flowing underground (Brewin Dolphin). Here designer Darren Hawkes’s choice of slate – more than 40,000 pieces cut and fixed by hand – for hard landscaping stands out among the more
familiar surfaces of stone, gravel and timber. Glass, weathered and stainless steel and concrete bring a more contemporary feel to several urban and community gardens, including the striking glass cube shelter in the Cloudy Bay Garden and the elegant stainless-steel dome laser cut with an Islamic pattern in the Beauty of Islam Garden, but it’s the Fresh gardens, as might be expected, that show a more cuttingedge use of materials.
John Warland (World Vision) uses acrylic rods as the central feature in his conceptual rice paddy, while Chelsea newcomer Sheena Seeks also uses acrylic for the giant test tubes enclosing a range of scented plants used to make perfume in her Fragrance Garden. Fernando Gonzalez shows how the casting resin Jesmonite can be cut, using technology from the aerospace industry, to make a shimmering organic structure that interplays with the relaxed planting.
Native trees tick the sustainability box and have been specified by many designers. English oaks are the signature trees for several gardens this year, with oak saplings making an appearance as symbols of regeneration. Field maples and hawthorns have taken over from birches, and expect to see the upright native willow Salix alba. Cork oaks are the tree of choice for several drought-tolerant plantings.
Among the new exhibitors in the Great Pavilion are two viola nurseries, Wildegoose Nursery and Wyndford Farm Plants, both exhibiting hardy perennial types. One or two sorts of Viola cornuta have been used in recent show gardens but perhaps these displays will generate a more widespread revival. Iris lovers can indulge in displays of old and new varieties – Sarah Cook is showing tall, bearded cultivars bred by Sir Cedric Morris that have not been seen at Chelsea for more than 60 years, while Claire Austin, who returns after a fouryear absence, is launching four new culitavars, including ‘Parting Glances’, a velvet-purple and old-gold beauty.
The Artisan gardens offer several journeys back in time. It will be hard to match the planting prowess of Japanese landscape artist Kazuyuki Ishihara’s tenth Chelsea garden ( Edo no Niwa – Edo Garden), his last in the style he calls ‘Awakening Japanese Nostalgia’.