Summer is the season of the horticultural shows, when thousands descend on Chelsea, Chatsworth, Malvern and Hampton Court to seek inspiration for their own gardens. This year, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Chelsea Flower Show, with my mum in tow, to see what the crème de la crème of garden designers and growers had in store for us. We were not disappointed, but this year I was struck by the consistency of theme: planting for climate change with a particular focus on trees.
The Resilience Garden, designed by Sarah Eberle, was initiated by the William Robinson Gravetye Charity. Victorian plantsman and writer Robinson lived and gardened just down the road at Gravetye Manor, now a luxury hotel and restaurant, where he pioneered the idea of the wild garden and experimented with planting trees. The Resilience Garden included trees which will be important in a future affected by climate change, such as the Gingko biloba or maidenhair tree, an ancient species dating back millions of years, the Japanese cedar which is a good source of sustainable timber and the Monkey Puzzle tree, originally from the Andes, which tolerates almost any soil type.
Brighton’s Andy Sturgeon, designed the M&G Garden, a woodland garden with ferns and young trees growing around sustainable burnt-oak timber sculptures. Sturgeon deliberately chose an unusual and biodiverse range of plants which suit the British climate, ranging from delicate pale blue Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ to giant leaved Gunnera killipiana and my favourite Iris chrysographes ‘Black Form’.
I was prepared not to like the Duchess of Cambridge’s RHS Back to Nature Garden, especially as there was a long queue to view it, but I was pleasantly surprised. Working alongside landscape architects Andree Davies and Adam White, Kate managed to recreate a patch of woodland to delight and trigger a love for nature in any child, with a palette of native flowers including wild strawberries, ramsons, sweet woodruff, lungwort and red deadnettle, planted around a giant nest for children to play in and a bridge over a stream perfect for a game of Pooh sticks.
French designer Laurélie de la Salle called her environmentally sustainable garden ‘The Harmonious Garden of Life’, including bamboo and ivy to purify the air, flag irises and bulrushes to filter the water and a clover meadow as a bee-friendly alternative to a lawn. She also made use of gravel to protect and keep the soil cool and a terracotta beehive to allow better thermal regulation for the bees.
The Savills David Harber Garden recreated a woodland clearing in a city setting, with bio-diverse large trees such as hornbeam, field maple, hazel and yew and native wild plants including herb Robert, stinking hellebores, buttercups and yellow archangel (Lamium galeobdolon) which also goes by the evocative name of ‘weasel’s snout’.
We are all going to have to start planting for greater extremes of weather, from drought to flash flooding and using hard landscaping materials that allow for both shelter and good drainage and it is fantastic that so many show gardens are leading the way.
