Hampton Court Palace Flower Show Designs
by
Bacchus Garden RDC Landscape Design and Construction
Gardens to suit every pocket are being planned, from the cost-conscious designs of the ‘Your Garden, Your Budget’ competition to the first show entry by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, as preparations hot up for this year’s Show which takes place in July.
Been inspired by show gardens but felt you could never create anything like them back at home? ‘Your Garden Your Budget’ is designed to show you how to get the designer wow factor -a professionally landscaped garden- without it costing the earth.
Four winning entries have been announced for this competition open only to members of the Association of Professional Landscapers (APL); they feature gardens designed for budgets from £7,000 up to £15,000 and draw their inspiration from around the world.
The £7000, ‘Green is the Colour’ design by Chew Valley Trees invites you into a green hideaway in a small low maintenance urban garden inspired by something rather larger – the woodlands and forests of eastern Canada.
Meanwhile the £10,000 ‘Bacchus Garden’ by Jean Waldrop Designs shown above, taking its cue from Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ and Hampton Court’s Great Vine, has a rather bibulous theme, depicting currents of wine flowing through tiered pools in a wine-glass-shaped, abundantly flowering, space.
Designer Stuart Charles Towner’s ‘Halo’ garden for the £13,000 budget, is Mediterranean, based on the imagery of a Greek island under the dome or ‘halo’ of its church.
While up-cycling, recycling and planting for pollinators will feature in Alexandra Froggatt’s environmentally- friendly ‘Garden of Solitude’, space for contemplation, for the £15,000 brief.
At the more exotic end of the show garden spectrum is Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne’s entry.
Designed by Gold-Medal- winning Australian designer Jim Fogarty, the garden draws on aboriginal dreamtime stories of a mountain, ridge and gorge creating serpent. Thus a Rainbow Serpent deck is shown, winding through references to rock formations of the Northern Territory- Uluru, the McDonnell Ranges –and passing charcoal timber blades, depicting the water which cascades off these rock features in times of rain, to nourish native Australian plants like those included in this design.