The M&G Garden
Designed by Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg
The Chelsea pressure starts mounting after Christmas. It was on 13 March, when the London Marathon was postponed, that we thought, OK, it probably isn’t going to happen. When we got the email, we were at the nursery, Crocus, setting out our trees. It was the right decision, but one of us did have a little cry.
Our garden was a small public space, like a pocket park: a place of respite for people and wildlife. The planting was robust, suitable for the urban environment and climate change. It included sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) for structure, bursts of colour from a black gum tree (Nyssa sylvatica) and the fragrant flowers and red edible berries of the autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata). We used a lot of reclaimed materials, including a large sculpture designed by Andrew Mcmullan, made from reconditioned pipework to evoke the garden’s imagined industrial past.
The plan is for the garden to make an appearance at Chelsea in 2021. It was always our commitment for it to have a permanent home after the show, and that will still happen next year, so we’ll be holding on to all the plants and trees. The garden feels even more resonant now; green space is vital for the mental wellbeing of people who don’t have gardens.
We are still busy: we’re working on the interior of five new glasshouses at Gothenburg Botanical Garden and gardens for a social justice charity. And because we are working from home (Charlotte in London; Hugo in Devon) we do have more time to be in our own gardens. We’ve been encouraging our studio colleagues to take a couple of hours off at lunchtime, to do some gardening or go for a walk so they get a break.
The Florence Nightingale Garden
A Celebration of Modern-Day Nursing, designed by Robert Myers
This garden would have marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. The strapline is “nurture through nature”: highlighting Nightingale’s emphasis on the importance of daylight and cleanliness, open space, garden views and the therapeutic benefit of plants.
The design is for a courtyard garden surrounded by a shady cloister, with floor-to-ceiling windows: the idea is that visitors would view the garden as if looking through a hospital window. The garden was going to be filled with the sort of medicinal plants Nightingale might have used, such as foxglove, which was used for heart problems, along with plants from the pressed flower collection she made as a young girl. The planting plan includes the straw foxglove, Digitalis lutea, and a cultivar of the common foxglove, D. purpurea ‘Dalmatian Peach’. I also included Chinese rhubarb, Rheum palmatum ‘Tanguticum’, as Nightingale always carried powdered rhubarb in her nursing bag. We hope the garden (which is sponsored by the Burdett Trust for Nursing) will appear at Chelsea next year.
I work from an old barn complex in Worcestershire: there’s a little courtyard that has been sitting unplanted for the past year since we moved in; some of the plants that the nursery Hortus Loci grew for the show garden have been rehomed there. My favourite is the fernleaf peony, which was among Nightingale’s pressed flower collection; coincidentally, it grows wild in the mountains of Crimea and Turkey, where she nursed during the Crimean war.
Guangzhou China: Guangzhou Garden
Designed by Peter Chmiel and Chin-Jung Chen
This was to be our first Chelsea. Our garden was inspired by a study tour of Guangzhou, known as China’s flower city. We were impressed by its environmental city planning: it has provided a green lung, water gardens and social spaces for residents so they can get close to nature. We are in a climate and biodiversity emergency and wanted our garden (which is sponsored by the Administration of Forestry and Gardening of Guangzhou Municipality) to highlight how cities can meet those challenges.
A show garden is a different scale for us – we are used to designing larger schemes, with an eye on maturation in 10 years or longer, so to do something that had to look immaculate and mature on day one was a great experience.
When the difficult, but correct, decision was made, the wind was taken out of our sails; but, fingers crossed, we can get it built next year. The garden was to feature more than 3,500 herbaceous perennials, marginal and aquatic plants. We’ll try to keep some, but some will have to be regrown. We both live in Somerset; working from home is challenging, but we’re managing well. We have set ourselves a few tasks, such as growing tarragon to make the ultimate chicken sandwich – anything to lift the spirits.
• Visit rhs.org.uk/Chelsea and follow #RHSChelsea on social media for more information on Virtual Chelsea, featuring garden tours, interactive Q&A sessions with RHS advisers, and more.
