If you remember, the box knot was already in place, and it gives a lovely sense of maturity to the garden – it’s hard to believe the rest was planted just a year ago!

The main border is designed to have strong colour and has predominantly the same height planting so that you view the layers of planting horizontally.  Solid forms mingle with light and airy forms to create constantly changing plant combinations as your viewpoint changes, while giving a strong sense of unity and rhythm to the border.  The silvery Stachys at the front gives just enough grounding to balance the exuberance.

Above; iceberg roses, Geranium Brookside and Salvia Caradonna.

On the opposite side of the lawn, under a beautiful brick wall (the garden is part of what was once the Victorian walled garden to the ‘big’ house), shady for most of the year, is a textural border with limited colour (so as not to compete with the main border);

and slightly further on, still beneath the wall, an urn is cushioned with Hakonechloa macra, white foxgloves and Polystichum ferns.

One of the areas I’m most pleased with is the herb garden.  Ultimately, this garden will be enclosed from the main garden with a yew hedge, and from the vegetable garden with a beech hedge.  It features a sunken brick-edged pond, self-binding gravel paths and some structural plants within the herb planting; specifically, cubes of box and lots of Stipa gigantea.

I thought you might like to see these pictures, taken by my clients, earlier in the year and through last winter:

It’s lovely to know how good the garden looks in winter, even if it does make me feel chilly! 

These major awards celebrate the outstanding skills and craftsmanship that go into making the very best gardens and I’m delighted for Original Landscapes that this is the third year in a row that they’ve taken the top prize in their category (categories determined by project value).

As well as the features you can see on my portfolio page, the garden also has a natural swimming pond (above), secluded small deck (below),

herb garden (below) and a mix of crisply sawn York paving with rubble walling, which marries the old and the new and allows the gently contemporary garden to ‘feel at home’ with the ancient building.

The judges were Mark Gregory (Chair of the APL and multi-award winner at Chelsea), James Alexander Sinclair (posh tv garden designer with hat), Stuart Marler (TVG Landscaping), Chris Young (deputy editor of The Garden) and Mark Wood of Bradstone.  The judges commented:  “The team appear to have effortlessly combined old and new materials and seamlessly blended hard and soft landscapes.  A fantastic project all round.”

Presenting the award, Mark Wood commented that “It is so refreshing to know that these types of schemes exist and we really hope that these prove an inspiration to landscapers and consumers as a whole.”

 
Rob Green (left) and Paul Eckett (right) receiving their award.  Chair of the judging panel Mark Gregory said, “We had a very tough decision on our hands.  Often there will be one or two entries that really stand out but this year there were more than a handful that were outstanding.  Many congratulations to Original Landscapes on their success.”

Well done from me too guys, and thank you for another beautifully made garden – you deserve the award!  Thanks too for allowing me to use your pictures on this post.

Original Landscapes http://www.original-landscapes.co.uk 
Association of Professional Landscapers http://www.landscaper.org.uk/

Christopher Tunnard, influencial designer working from the 1930s, aired his frustration that Chelsea gardens showed nothing new or original and that English garden design in general fostered the ‘traditional’ formal garden, inappropropriate, in his opinion, with the culture, architecture and lifestyles of the time (how little has changed!).  He was frustrated by the English resistance to Modernism, which, with the notable exception of John Brookes’s Mondrian inspired garden for Penguin books in the 1960s, did not begin to take a proper hold in the UK until Christopher Bradley Hole’s modernist garden at Chelsea (‘the Latin Garden’) in 1997.  What was significant about this garden was the fact that it took Best in Show, beating its neighbour – a ‘contemporary’ Arts and Crafts garden created for the centenary of Country Life – and marked the first time that Modernism really began to take a hold in the English garden psyche.

I share Christopher Tunnard’s frustration at the English resistance to contemporary garden design, which is still on-going.  While exciting and innovative private gardens are being created, it is still the Arts and Crafts variety that win the people’s choice at Chelsea.  Even this year, with Andy Sturgeon’s beautiful contemporary garden, full of vitality, drive, energy, calm, colour and space, the people’s choice went to a ‘traditional’ garden created by Roger Platts – expertly executed but showing nothing new.

 
It’s not that Arts and Crafts gardens aren’t beautiful, or worth preserving and enjoying (they are, as you can see from these pictures, all taken on the tour and shown in chronological order!), it’s that they should be seen in context; the context of an era that created them that is so far removed from our current times.  They should not be the model, nor the ’ideal’, for contemporary living (nor can they be – Gertrude Jekyll employed 16 gardeners at her own garden of Munstead Wood).

I find it doesn’t take much to inspire people to contemporary gardens; you just need to open their eyes to what current design is all about, break the way of thinking that the ‘best’ garden is on the English Arts and Crafts model and we-should-all-be-aspiring-to-it, and show them a contemporary planting (such as the Piet Oudolf borders at Wisley).  But the most important of those is being open.

So I feel I have achieved my mission for that week – to have had a highly enjoyable time in the company of interesting and interested people; to have seen some fascinating historic gardens (and put them in their context!); to have taken in some inspiring contemporary design; but most importantly, to have opened just a few eyes to the fact that what garden designers are creating now is even more exciting, even more relevant, than any ‘traditional’ English garden – however beautiful – can be at the beginning of the 21st century.

The gardens shown here are Athelhampton www.athelhampton.co.uk
Cothay Manor www.cothaymanor.co.uk
Mapperton www.mapperton.com
Wayford Manor (private Harold Peto garden open occasionally under the National Gardens Scheme)
Tintinhull www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-tintinhullgarden 
Stanbridge Mill (private Arabella Lennox Boyd garden open once a year under the NGS)
and a private garden designed by Dan Pearson, not open to the public.

The tour was designed and led by me for Martin Randall Travel www.martinrandall.com (specialist in cultural tours and Travel Company of the Year for three out of the last four years).  I hope very much that we might run it again in 2012!

To increase the feeling of space, I’ve designed a slightly wider terrace – as wide as I can make it without compromising the knottette, using deep, pale Yorkstone slabs.  I’ve also designed a pair of symmetrical wide, shallow steps that wrap around the box, making it feel part of the terrace and so also increasing the illusion of space.

This (below) is the rest of the garden as it was before we began work; lovely wall (though obsurred by a box-edged path) but your eye rushes to the end of the garden, stopping only to wonder what on earth the blob in the middle of the lawn is.

My design (see model below) re-aligns the view to the width, not the length, of the garden, so the wall will be much more of a feature.  It’s shady under the wall, so will be full of hellebores, ferns, hakonechloa grasses and small white geraniums (geranium sanguineum album – it’s one I love and you can see it here www.amandapatton.co.uk/portfolio/south-molton/ image 7, where it’s making a lovely association with a Welsh poppy and some alchemilla mollis).

To the back of the new (square) lawn, I’ve designed a ‘yew walk’, which will give a lovely backdrop to the planting in front, and some good structure and shadows.  This leads to an evening terrace and a herb garden, which features a brick edged sunken pool, and beyond that is a vegetable garden.  I’ll post more photos as things develop!