How would you define a garden? As a place in which you attempt to impose your
idea of order on nature, perhaps, or somewhere to grow flowers and
vegetables, encourage wildlife and escape from the hurly-burly? Maybe you
consider that space outside your back door merely as a barbecue area and a
place for your dog to test his tonsils by barking at the neighbours?
Or do you think of it as a place to exercise your intellect, employing plants,
materials and the landscape to do so? This summer, a host of events seek to
consider gardens and their contents from a more cerebral angle.
Kim Wilkie, a landscape architect who studied history at Oxford and redesigned
the courtyard at the V&A, in London, has included classical allusions in
a new land form created for the Duke of Buccleugh in parkland at Boughton,
in Northamptonshire. Unveiled next month, Orpheus is a 165ft by 165ft sunken
inverted pyramid representing the classical underworld of Hades, built to
complement the existing grassy 18th-century mount. Depicting Olympus, home
of the Greek gods, the mount is thought to have been designed by Charles
Bridgeman, the great designer whose naturalistic landscapes (such as those
at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire), peppered with classical temples and grottoes,
were considered radical at a time when traditional gardens were enclosed and
intimate. Wilkie’s earthwork is contemporary in style, rather than
cutting-edge, as it has to fit in with the Grade I-listed historic park at
Boughton.
Rather more Brit Art in approach are the Conceptual Gardens at the Royal
Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court show, which starts on Tuesday. There
are six entries in the category, which has been going since 2006 and,
according to the RHS, “seeks to question and redefine existing design
boundaries”. Bridgeman’s 21st-century counterparts have to create their
works within the space of a tiny town garden.
This year’s offerings include It’s Hard to See, which, by using leafy bog
plants in a pit lined with mirrors, “represents the beauty and benefit of
inner growth and self-reflection in contrast to the artificial values of
consumer-orientated society”. One wonders what Design in Latitude, the
garden design company creating it, charges for its services.
Flemons Warland Design is showing Concreation, which “focuses on the
precarious relationship between man and nature” — a concrete plinth is
punctured by a giant crack through which naturalised plants are growing.
Then there is Journey to Eco-awakening, a Zen garden — surely the oldest
form of “conceptual” landscape there is — in which each plant and pebble
drips with deeper meaning.
A similar new category will appear at the RHS show at Tatton Park, in
Cheshire, held at the end of the month. The six Visionary Gardens will
concentrate on artistic concepts, future fashions, environmental
implications and the use of sustainable materials. As with those at Hampton
Court, you wouldn’t necessarily want to create such an installation at home
(although it would certainly be a talking point) but, thanks to the use of
sustainable materials, there should be plenty of elements that give you
ideas.
This year, a conceptual show garden even made it to Chelsea, the pinnacle of
horticultural excellence and tradition (along with the Top Gear presenter
James May’s crowd-pulling offering, filled entirely with Plasticine flowers,
the Athena-poster version of conceptual art). Tony Smith, its designer, had
form at Hampton Court: In Digestion, which used thousands of young lettuce
plants as part of an installation to explore “the assimilation or otherwise
of both food and information in a decadent society”, won best in show for
its category in 2007; Ecstasy in a Very Black Box (which, with a floor
planted again with thousands of lettuces, contained within a big black
building, represented bipolar disorder) was awarded a gold last year.
Smith’s Chelsea garden was based on a dream. Including dark slate stepping
stones, massed pink bizzy lizzies, astelias and spiky yuccas and phormiums,
it depicted a journey from a harsh world to a place of comfort (the sponsor,
after all, was a loo-paper manufacturer). “I have used the materials and the
plants to create a picture or a sculpture, rather than purely how a gardener
would use plants for their own sake,” he said when describing his display,
which won a silver flora medal.
Gardeners at these short shows can afford to do wacky things such as plant
thousands of lettuces that will grow, bolt and die in a matter of weeks, but
in the real world, one has to be practical. For long-lasting avant-garde
designs, visit Future Gardens, based at Butterfly World, near St Albans, in
Hertfordshire, where the exhibits include white parasols floating on washing
lines above the planting (Welcome! by Rosita Castro Dominguez, Isabelle
Fordin and Anomiastudia Architects) or white plastic trees set against a
backdrop of eerie piped music (The H Garden by Bruno Marmiroli).
The show runs until October, so the gardens (chosen from more than 100
entries) must live for months rather than days. Put on by the team that
organised Westonbirt, Britain’s first conceptual garden festival, which ran
at the national arboretum in Gloucestershire between 2001 and 2006, the 2009
gardens will be replaced next year.
As the wider 27-acre site is devoted to the conservation of butterflies, it is
not surprising that most of the designs are heavy on wildlife-friendly
materials and plants. Many of these are perennials, so would last for years,
which makes the ideas all the more theftworthy for one’s own patch.
Tony Heywood’s heavily jewelled and rather scary Anthroscape 3 sculpture might
be a bit much for most, but others are gentler on the eye. Indeed, many are
rather lovely. Nest, by the husband-and-wife team Erik De Maeijer and Jane
Hudson, for example, includes a beautifully made willow and dogwood hurdle,
wrapped round a wide bowl lined with soft Stipa tennuisima grasses in which
are four giant wooden “eggs” (representing their four children). The
planting consists of cosy reds, purples and blues; the whole piece would sit
happily as a surprise in a corner of any largish garden.
The Release Garden, apparently inspired by the music of Wagner, leads the
visitor through a forest of tangled wood, dotted with shade-lovers such as
foxgloves, ferns and cyclamen, into a calm space with a reflective pool and
vivid plants — day lilies, flag irises, rudbeckias. It is “a symphonic
build-up, then a sense of release followed by a point of calm”, say Michelle
Wake and Chloe Leaper, its creators.
There are strong French influences throughout Future Gardens, down to the shop
stocked with rows of hydrangeas (a Gallic favourite) and tasteful garden
products. The French themselves can mount this sort of show with a minimum
of fuss. At the recent three-day Jardins Jardin show in Paris, exhibits such
as the best-in-show entry by Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot for Laurent-Perrier,
Un Jardin Aérien (An aerial garden), in which a metallic tree, adorned with
10,000 leaves made from mother-of-pearl, hangs over “clouds” of soft grasses
and plants, sat comfortably in the shade of the Tuileries’ pleached trees.
Alongside were stalls selling beautifully presented plants, labels and
garden ornaments.
Jardins Jardin, like many of the shows that push the boundaries of what makes
a garden, owes much to the Chaumont international festival, which has been
running in the grounds of the Loire chateau of the same name every summer
since 1992. This year’s theme is colour and how it affects the senses.
There is a danger, however, that in the present excitement about “concept”,
one can get distracted from the fact that a garden is ultimately about the
plants it contains and where it is sited — show gardens tend to relate to
the space they are allocated, a few feet wide, rather than the whole
landscape.
When Niall Hobhouse launched a competition in 2007 to produce a radical design
for the Hadspen Parabola, the walled garden on his Somerset estate, it was
“a platform for new ideas”. “I wanted to connect gardening and design
again,” he says. “It was my protest against ‘conceptual’ gardens.”
What he got was more than 100 designs that had minimal connection with the
context of the site and gave little thought to the development and evolution
of the planting. So far, he has not found the solution, but the space is
being put to good use: some friends are growing vegetables there. There’s
still plenty of room for other things to emerge, though. “We’ll see what
happens in the future,” he says.
The RHS Hampton Court Flower Show runs from Tuesday to Sunday, Tatton Park
from July 22 to 26; 0844 209 1810, rhs.org.uk
.
Future Gardens runs until October 4; 01727 869203, futuregardens.org.
Orpheus, at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, will open on August 1; 01536
515731, boughtonhouse.org.uk.
The Chaumont festival runs until October 18; 00 33 2 54 20 99 22, domaine-chaumont.fr
