Every inch of the showground at Chelsea has been allocated and agonised over
for the best part of a year; each plot designed to the smallest pebble and
blade of grass. The actual build is the easy part. Despite the machinery,
muck and noise there was a strangely calm atmosphere about the place last
week, like a choreographed ballet of garden making.
Andy Sturgeon’s role as designer of a garden for Merrill Lynch, the show’s
main sponsor, at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which opens on Tuesday, could
be extremely stressful. However, when we meet on site this likeable,
easy-going man seems to be taking it all in his stride. “The contractor’s
fantastic,” he says. “They never get any of the glory, but they’re the ones
who have to do the really difficult side of it and make sure it works within
the time schedule. They’ve got the really tough job.”
However good the contractors, there are inevitable glitches that crop up when
building a show garden. Sturgeon’s design strives to combine a beautiful
garden with a home-working environment, but the metal structure of the home
office has given him problems.
“The building has been made off-site. It arrived on a low loader with a car in
front with a flashing light and one behind, having come all the way down
from up north on the motorway, and it wouldn’t fit through the gate. Nobody
told us it was coming in one piece, despite endless communication. It caused
a health-and-safety panic, not to mention a massive queue of traffic,
because they wanted to lift it over the fence. All the show organisers were
tearing their hair out.”
Despite this setback, for somebody who denies being a trained garden designer,
Sturgeon is going from strength to strength. “When I was a student there
were only landscape-architecture or management courses. If there had been a
garden design course available, I would have done it.” He graduated from the
Welsh College of Horticulture in 1987 having completed a course in interior
landscaping — a bizarre mix of landscape architecture, design and floristry
— and by 1989 had set up his own business.
“In those days, nobody knew what a garden designer was. They used to say to
me, ‘So you lay paving then?’ and, more to the point, nobody wanted anything
interesting done. We were using York stone and railway sleepers and that was
it.”
But Sturgeon sensed there was huge untapped potential in designing gardens and
was determined to persevere. Tossed into the public arena with Planted, a
cutting-edge gardening style book published in 1998, Sturgeon became the
good-looking golden boy of gardening. At 39, he now directs operations,
rather than gets his hands dirty: “I really, really miss the hands-on bit,
but it’s impossible to mix the two, I think.”
“Though I’m not physically doing the work now, I’m still instigating it and —
given that I’m a bit of a control freak — controlling nature and making
everything exactly how I want it.”
Surprisingly, this is only his second garden for Chelsea. The first, the
masculine-themed Circ Contemporary Man’s Garden, was awarded a silver-gilt
medal in 2001. An infectious boyish giggle peppers our conversation as he
recalls his naivety at the time. “We had a dead tree, so we could never have
got a gold. I should have ripped it out — I should have just taken a bloody
chain saw to it.” Though a silver-gilt is a perfectly respectable medal for
a first garden, this year only a gold will do.
Whether his efforts have what it takes remains to be seen, since judging takes
place tomorrow. Sturgeon hopes to design a garden “that functions and works
as a real garden, a nice place that people can imagine themselves in. I
don’t go in for the pastiche thing because, although they’re brilliant in
their own way, they’re not really gardens, and I could never go down that
route.” He pauses momentarily. “If people want to be in it, then I’ll be
happy.”
On paper, it certainly has the makings of a winning design. The garden
surrounds a home-working environment, a lifestyle that has become the norm
for many of us, and the trend is set to continue.
He is hoping the garden will have appeal far beyond the home-worker: “Although
we’re terming it a ‘home office’, it could equally be an extension to a
house. A lot of the gardens at Chelsea don’t have any buildings, so the
public aren’t shown how they would relate to a solid structure. I think the
building will help anchor the garden and give it some sense of reality.”
My own working-from-home environment is vastly different from the sleek
perfection of Sturgeon’s design. With my paperwork spread across the kitchen
table and a toddler tripping over the computer wires, somehow the sleek
steel-and-glass cube overlooking the garden is out of my reach. Sturgeon
laughs heartily: “Yeah, it’s not my reality either, but maybe it’s something
that I can aspire to have.”
He is aiming for a certain ambiguity, and wants the garden to look “restful,
but not too restful, because obviously it’s a work place, too”. By including
water features that introduce movement or reflection, but very little noise,
he hopes to create subtle stimuli and energy without distraction. The
materials used in the hard landscaping are traditional, but he has given
them a contemporary feel: “We’ve used cleanly cut oak cubes and natural
stone paving, which are combined with a lawn and lots of plants. I’ve tried
to play down the hard man-made materials, the shiny stainless steel of the
fence and building, and although the garden certainly has a masculine
quality to it, I’m hoping it will be softened by the planting.”
When it came to choosing the plants, Sturgeon stuck largely with what he knows
and loves, including euphorbias, santolinas, lavenders. His own basement
home office has inspired him: “Part of it looks out on to the front garden,
which is planted with a lot of the plants we’re using here, so I look at
them all the time. You could say I just looked out the window, thought,
‘Let’s do that’, and wrote it all down.”
The emphasis in the Chelsea garden is perhaps more on leaf texture than
colour. “I like to contrast things like hebe and box, that are quite rigid
and controlled, with floppy plants such as Stipa tenuissima, which
we’re using with Dianthus carthusianorum.” The garden will
also be dotted with the deliciously dark Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’.
“It’s not going to be a riot of colour, but I’m hoping that we’re striking
the balance just right.” Other plants with purplish hues include cardoons,
acanthus and purple sage.
Sturgeon is working with Howard’s, a wholesale grower, which is providing the
vast majority of the plants. Some of the more unusual perennials are coming
from smaller specialised nurseries, such as Orchard Dene, with irises coming
from Woottens and an aquilegia from Beth Chatto. The trees have been shipped
in from the Netherlands, 11 in total. “We chose birches, Betula
nigra, because they are guaranteed to be in leaf for the Chelsea Flower
Show. I had wanted to use something else, a sophora, but they are late and,
given my previous mistake with a tree, we wanted no risks.”
Given the unpredictability of our weather, too, and plant behaviour, it’s
nerve-racking trying to get the plants to perform for this one week. “We’ve
got 12 plants that won’t last till Chelsea, or won’t be in flower by the
time the show starts. Certainly, the top three off my list, including Achillea
‘Terracotta’, are among them, and possibly the top five.” “What are you
going to do about it?” I ask. He pauses momentarily before replying, “Cry”,
adding through a hail of laughter “and generally be sulky”.
“I went to visit the nursery and tried to be really optimistic and upbeat
about it, but the more I thought about it the more depressed I got. The
nursery’s in Suffolk, miles from where I live, but I’ve got a very good
friend who lives nearby, so I just went round to his house and got drunk.
Still, we rallied the next day, spoke to a few contacts and got things from
various places.”
Sturgeon has ordered 2,300 plants, with fewer than two-thirds making it into
the finished garden. “The tulips change as they open, but they’re still good
throughout the whole time, and I quite like it even when they’re falling
apart a bit.” But a spell of really warm weather could mean others suffer
badly towards the end of the week. Some spare plants will be held in reserve
to refresh the garden should the need arise, and the others will go back to
the growers.
Sturgeon knows that when it comes to the judging, attention to detail is
crucial: “I can’t see any point in coming here, doing all this work and then
letting yourself down by not having something built properly. This is the
world stage, and you can’t afford to make mistakes.”
It seems to me that some gardens are built with an enormous amount of passion
and reckless daring. Others are tailored towards winning that gold and
giving the judges what they want. Where does Sturgeon come between the two
extremes? “I hope I’m treading a very thin line between the two; that’s
certainly what I’ve tried to do, but I am prepared to take certain gambles
in order to avoid compromising the design.”
As to whether or not there is a formula for a gold-winning garden, Sturgeon
has seen a recurring theme in gold-winning gardens of the past: “You don’t
have too much colour in there because the more colour you have, the more
risks you’re taking, and the more plants you have to get in flower for the
week of the show. And you’ve got to think more about your colour
combinations and plant quality. It also needs to be a good design that’s
simple and without too much hard landscaping — which they don’t like — and
be built very well. It would be hard not to give such a garden a gold
because you couldn’t pull it down on anything.”
Perfection doesn’t come cheap. Budgets for the larger gardens can be huge.
Sturgeon is too discreet to tell me exactly how much his garden has cost,
but he insists “it has certainly cost less than the average £200,000 for the
big gardens”.
He’s already dreading the end of the show: “I can’t be anywhere around — it’s
just too soul-destroying. I always think about Tracey Emin moaning about her
artwork being destroyed in that warehouse fire, and I just think ‘get a
life’. Everything we do like this gets ripped apart, and I think some of us
probably put a lot more effort into it than she does.”
