Chelsea Flower Show 2022 Preview: Wilderness and Wattling
Marching through the wilderness, The flower show at Chelsea features so many gardens of wildflowers and country trees that formal gardens seem a little out of place.
Join us for a quick tour of Press Day at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
Andy Sturgeon’s masterful tapestry of textures for the “Mind Garden”. With perfectly pitched hoggin (sandy gravel) and an exquisite plant palette, not to mention curved walls that seem to float, Andy Sturgeon’s Mind Garden has an authority on Chelsea’s Main Avenue.
A member of the Royal Horticultural Council suggested to me that one plant was put in as a teaser for serious botanists: yellow-flowered Saruma henrii, a useful but rare wild ginger, great for dry shade. A “Rewilding Britain Landscape,” or, life with beavers.
In the UK, beavers are being reintroduced to landscapes, especially those which are undergoing a process of rewilding. The style takeaway of the hideout building (for nature-watching) is a corrugated roof and rough-hewn wooden walls.
“Hands off Mangrove by Grow2Know,” designed by Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Danny Clarke, is against the railings of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.
“Hands off Mangrove by Grow2Know” is an elegant show piece, while being fit for purpose as a community garden, which will be its after-show incarnation.
A corten-steel structure, representing the roots of a mangrove tree, sits easily with desiccated licorice plants and pollarded willow: “When you move around the metal form, they contrast without competing,” comments Tayshan Hayden-Smith, who founded the non-profit .
This year, attention has been paid to the sides and back of show gardens, with ferns growing out of reconstituted walls and dry hedges, and perimeters of corrugated metal mingling with beech.