We love: Cleve Wests Best Show Garden, Chelsea Flower Show

Posted:28 May 2011

Well, 2011s Chelsea Flower Show extravaganza is over the years inspirational kick-start for new gardening ideas, plantings and structures we loved it!

Cleve Wests garden for The Daily Telegraph was awarded Best Show Garden quite an accolade and well deserved, this was a beautiful garden and one of our favourites.  We always expect the unexpected with Cleves gardens, yet they still have recognisable qualities strong sculptural forms (last year remember those huge concrete planters? And the year before his dementia-friendly sensory garden with a giant sculptured ball at its centre?), moving water and sensitive planting.

This year his gardens warm off-yellow plastered and dry-stone walls and flowing water framed an open space containing three 10ft high columns by French artists Serge Bottagisio and Agnès Decoux, with one lying on the ground, that appeared to be ruins but in fact mix the old and new in concrete and terracotta.

The planting looked so unconscious, almost self-seeded in effect, and the colouring exquisite a soft blend of yellows, silvers and soft-whites highlighted by the occasional dark red-pink Dianthus cruentus, grasses and airy umbellifers (including parsnip flowers from his own allotment!). Specimen trees of Styphnolobium japonicum (the Japanese pagoda tree), gave scale to the planting, rising up from the sunken gravel area to soften the effect of the monolithic columns.