60° East - A Garden Between Continents

PROFILE

Designers Ekaterina Zasukhina with Carly Kershaw

Chelsea history Debut

Plot RGB1

Sponsors Bodmin Jail, Bodmin Jail Hotel

Contractor Cube 1994

Theme An evocation of the Ural Mountain landscapes and a call for our collective need to look after the Earth

Contact Elena Zasukhina +7 912 243 46 99, uralgarden.com; Carly Kershaw 01962 711600, heduk.com

Occupying the Rock Garden Bank site at the bottom of Main Avenue, the Bodmin Jail garden is a reinterpretation of one designed by Ekaterina Zasukhina in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals – the meeting point of Europe and Asia. Inspired by the area’s beauty, the garden draws on the planting palettes of the East and the West to create a colourful and uplifting journey into the Ural Mountains.

A gravel path leads through a mix of long-flowering perennials, including geraniums, sanguisorbas, salvias and Alchemilla mollis, around rocks and up rugged steps made from dark-green Ural quartzite. On one side a stream tumbles down the slope and on the other a patch of meadow is revealed beneath a multi-stemmed Malus and an Acer tataricum subsp. ginnala. The path bends, enabling a closer view of a striking sculpture of two figures in rusted steel by Penny Hardy and a cloud-pruned Pinus mugo overhanging the water, creating a naturalistic, windswept effect.

A group of pines suggests the forested slopes where the source of the babbling water is revealed in a dramatic waterfall that cascades down the rockface constructed from a cluster of Ural rocks, some more than 2.5m high, into a pool. Here a stone bridge allows the journey to continue past a majestic weeping willow and alongside a larger pool where water lilies bloom in the calmer parts. The journey back down the garden is via more stone steps, past drifts of streamside flowers such as Lythrum salicaria ‘Swirl’, Veronica beccabunga and Myosotis scorpioides.