There are 21 show gardens at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, but in the
build-up to opening day on Tuesday, it was not difficult to spot the site of
the Australian Inspiration garden. It was the one with the two large
shipping containers festooned with Australian flags.
Nearly everything to do with the garden has been imported, including
wheelbarrows, pine-bark compost, garden tools and hard landscaping. “We’re
taking no chances,” jokes Jim Fogarty, the garden’s designer. There was even
a supply of Anzac biscuits to keep the team of strapping lads going as they
created the garden on their allotted patch.
This is the first year that an Australian garden has been created at the show,
and the team is proud of the fact. “It’s a very big deal back home,” says
Fogarty, a gold-medal winner at the Melbourne and Sydney flower shows. The
team’s progress is being shown every Friday night on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC, and the
country’s television and radio networks are coming over to cover the event.
Australian pride in the garden is reflected in the fact that it has been
sponsored up to the hilt by companies such as Fleming’s Nurseries (the
biggest commercial tree nursery in the country), despite the fact that there
will be little commercial gain to be had from a show on the other side of
the world.
The 12-strong Aussie team has been staying in three flats in Notting Hill,
west London, where the construction manager’s wife has her work cut out
acting as a surrogate mother, cooking dinner, keeping up the biscuit
supplies and washing the team’s smart khaki kit. There is a fair amount of
joshing, pom-bashing and self-mockery going on. “We’re one of only two teams
wearing full uniforms here,” says Fogarty. “HMP Leyhill (the open prison
whose inmates create an ever-popular garden at the show) is the other.” The
Kiwis in the 100% Pure New Zealand Ora garden, also making their debut at
Chelsea, are treated tactfully. “We’re looking forward to some friendly,
good-spirited competition,” adds Fogarty, not entirely convincingly. Fogarty
has created the kind of contemporary garden you might find in a smart suburb
of Melbourne, a city with a climate similar to Britain’s. “Being the first
(at Chelsea), we are trying to represent the Australian spirit,” he says.
“It’s a garden for entertaining, drinking, eating and family: a usable
garden.”
Many elements will remind expatriate Aussies of home — the barbecue (of
course); a corrugated-iron wall and wooden structures made from red gum and
jarrah; eucalyptus, both in the form of coppiced sugar gums and stacked as
firewood to form a wall; rusted steel containers in a reference to Ned
Kelly’s outlaw helmet, and rammed-earth walls. Despite this, all the plants
in the garden are available in Britain — in fact, they have all been grown
in nurseries here as quarantine laws prevented their importation.
The garden is inspired by one Fogarty designed for the Melbourne International
Flower and Garden Show in 2003, the southern hemisphere’s equivalent of
Chelsea, which won best in show. The colour scheme may be recognisably
Australian — namely burgundies, sand, silver and charcoal, the earthy
colours of the bush — but he has not confined himself to a strictly
Australian palette. “It’s a 50:50 mix of natives and exotics,” he says. But
where we would think of Australian plants such as callistemons, Cordyline
australis ‘Red Star’ and Grevillea ‘Robyn Gordon’ as exotics, to Fogarty
British garden staples such as euphorbias, honeysuckle and lavender fall
into this class.
Although there are also a fair amount of Australian wildflowers in the scheme,
Fogarty explains that he didn’t want a purely native creation, “as that
wouldn’t reflect Australian gardens. We are influenced by many parts of the
world”.
With summers over here set to become warmer, he thinks Australia can also
teach us something about using drought-tolerant plants. “We’re going through
a drought at the moment,” he says. “All these plants we use in Melbourne.”
The eucalyptus firewood wall, stacked and held together in steel gabions, came
over in the shipping containers but, as with the plants, there were
quarantine problems with importing soil for the rammed-earth walls. Rick
Lindsay travelled from Mansfield, Victoria, to create the walls from
Northamptonshire ironstone at Earth Structures, a company based in Market
Harborough, Leicestershire, and run by Aussie expat Bill Swaney.
Rammed-earth, or cob, walls tend to be associated with old rural buildings
in Britain, but Lindsay has perfected a method of creating them in moulds,
which means they can be made to an exact size and have a more contemporary,
polished look.
This method is a popular way of making houses in Australia but has hardly
caught on over here. The walls may have a little cement in them for
stability, but Lindsay is proud of the fact that this method of building a
wall produces 200 times fewer carbon-dioxide emissions than a double-brick
wall or breeze blocks.
Fogarty and his team’s efforts are as much about showing off Australia as they
are about gardens. “It’s a great chance for Australian industry to stand up
on the world stage with our design, construction, plants and nurseries,” he
says. “We have matured now. Chelsea is our little Mount Everest.” Their flag
is planted.
Earth Structures, 01858 565 436. Nurseries: Hilliers, 01794 368 733,
www.hillier.co.uk; Ball Colegrave, 01295 810 632, www.ballcolegrave.co.uk;
The Old Walled Garden, 01732 810 012, www.theoldwalledgarden.co.uk
