‘On the Edge’ CPRE Garden Hits the Mark at RHS Chelsea
Top garden designer Sarah Eberle said she would not design for RHS Chelsea again. She had bucketfuls of Chelsea gold medals and awards already, but she was lured out of retirement by a cause dear to her heart: the importance (and vulnerability) of those marginal areas of nature in which humans find content.
That cause proved dear to more hearts than hers. She won the top award, ‘Garden of the Year’.
Entitled ‘On the Edge’, and commissioned by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, Eberle’s garden aimed to raise awareness of ‘the fragility of rural landscapes, focusing on vulnerable spaces including ordinary fringe landscapes constantly under threat’.
Deliberately eschewing the exotic, Eberle achieved this award through sheer skill, using plants more familiar from a Sunday walk than a garden centre.
The design centred around the massive figure of a sleeping woman carved from a tree trunk. As Eberle pointed out, you have something like six seconds to grab the attention of the passers-by and lure them in to take a closer look. The figure of Gaia, or Mother Nature, certainly achieved that. Her willow ‘hair’ flowed onto the top of a dry stone wall while her hand trailed in a stream, linking different elements of the garden.
The symbolism may not have been subtle, but the planting definitely was. Inspired by her upbringing on a Devon smallholding, Eberle chose native British and Irish plants, many often dismissed as weeds, the kind of grasses and flowers you might find on the margins of towns, villages or even building sites. Careful placing created a naturalistic effect, with no hard edges, making the point about our human need for something soft and subtly beautiful to lift our lives, particularly if you live in an urban area where reconnecting with nature is even more precious and difficult to achieve.
Every element of the garden was sustainable and the garden itself will be relocated to a regenerated housing development in Sheffield.
The RHS itself, however, has come under attack during Chelsea week. From displaying a Range Rover to promote its new sponsor, to insisting on its growers using only peat-free compost (try growing carnivorous plants without peat), criticism has taken a little of the ‘gilt off the gingerbread’. One critic commented that ‘the RHS flagship event has a lithium mine on a driveway as a main focus’.
That didn’t stop the great, the good and the garden fanatics paying over £140 each to enjoy the miracle that is perfect plants arranged in perfect displays. Or, more miraculous still, gardens that look as though they have evolved over decades but which have been carted in by lorry and installed in a matter of weeks. Oh, and gnomes were back, allowed free entry after years in the wildnerness.
Let’s hope that Chelsea gives Eberle’s – and the CPRE’s – message the good publicity it deserves.