Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
Andy Sturgeon never looks miserable, and he frequently collects prizes. This year, his “captured landscape” for the Telegraph won Best in Show this week at the annual Chelsea Flower Show, as did his previous Chelsea show garden.
Sculptural Slabs
Monolithic slabs, a primal fire bowl. The fossil-rich limestone paving is sourced from Portugal, dating from the Jurassic period.
Structural Backbone
The backbone of this garden is literally based on the spinal fins of a dinosaur, with shards of bronze-coated steel disrupting the long straight line of a Chelsea show garden rectangle.
The garden has an uncompromising sense of direction, the mise-en-scène beginning at the corner where most of the crowds gather, and marching directly into the center with its shallow water and pale bridges.
Graphic Drama
Simple Complexity
Part of Andy Sturgeon’s gift is to combine various stories and still make a strong narrative. Like several other show gardens this year, there is a preoccupation with Mediterranean-style conditions for plants, though this garden is not based on a particular landscape.
Non-Pretty Plants
Just as Andy’s structural shapes can be uncompromising, so too are his plant selections, with intriguing but not conventionally beautiful drought survivors such as this Sarcopoterium spinosum.
Reliably Surprising
Sturgeon is the first to admit that his inspiration can come from anywhere but horticulture. They spring out of rough terrain that is not a path exactly and neither is it a flowerbed.
Foliage Over Flowers
Although there is rich color in this garden, it is really about green, silver-green and blue-green. The plants may have been cosseted in the process of making them show-worthy, yet there is none of the floppy luxuriance that is more familiar in the artifice of a show garden.
An Artist’s Composition
A garden with yin as well as yang. Grit is no fun without smooth elegance; prehistoric shapes have a reassuring modernity; the flicker of an outdoor fire is within babbling distance of a brook.