Green. A totally green garden without colourful flowers. Some black rocks. That’s about it. At first glance, it is the sort of garden a bee might buzz straight through on its way to a more nourishing habitat. To dramatically oversimplify for those who haven’t yet seen it, Andy Sturgeon’s M&G Garden is half Midsomer and half Mad Max. And yet this simple garden design won best in show at the RHS Chelsea flower show yesterday.
Not everyone is happy about this. First, say some, gardens need colour and variety. Second, there is the issue of nectar, or lack of it. Wildlife-friendly folk argue (correctly) that gardens need flowers to provide life-giving nectar for the bees and other invertebrates that are already in decline throughout the world. But there is more going on in this garden than you might realise at first.
There is the design. The black rocks (apparently made from specially prepared oak) represent volcanic rocks that protrude from the ocean, giving the garden a barren, almost otherworldly, quality.
Then there are the plants. There are lots of mosses, ferns and grasses – species able to colonise and eke out an existence in the most barren cracks and crannies on the planet. In fact, some of these plants go back 400m years. And, it turns out that there are flowers in this garden – it is just that many of them are in colours that might not grab our human eyes.
Here is a garden that looks as if it playing by its own rules, which is what nature does best if we give it the time and the space. This is an important point that, perhaps, the garden’s designer is trying to make. Many of the environmental crises that we are unleashing on the planet, particularly the current climate emergency, are in some way repairable by nature. As long we provide the space and the political willingness to curb some of our activities, nature has the tools to fix this place. Like plants that grow on volcanic rocks, nature can rebuild. Recolonise. Begin again. Nature is unthinkingly drawn towards succession. Nature can make a Midsomer out of a Mad Max.
Could this garden be bettered? Emphatically yes, and here is my simple guide. Leave this garden alone; let the wildflowers blow in; let the bees and pollinating flies gather; allow the fungi to eat the oak; let nature do what it does best. And then resubmit it next year.
