last word
The last WORD
Hard landscaping is stylish! The Chelsea Flower Show showed how stone and concrete is being to create stylish garden design features.
By Mike Leeming
Mike Leeming is director of sales at Bradstone.
As the pinnacle of the annual gardening calendar, The RHS Chelsea Flower Show never fails to provide a number of talking points for amateur enthusiasts and professional gardeners alike. Whether it’s the striking use of exotic planting or the creation of awe-inspiring sculptures, the show provides an insight in to the future trends of the gardening world and offers inspiration for the thousands of visitors who delight in the spectacle each year.
A
s such, the show offers the ideal platform for companies looking to
showcase groundbreaking product developments which will challenge the preconceptions of what can be achieved with hard landscaping and promote the use of sustainable materials in a thought provoking way. Through our sponsorship of the
Chris Beardshaw Mentoring Scholarship (CBMS), each year we work alongside up-and-coming garden designers at Chelsea with the aim of demonstrating how inspirational garden design can go hand in hand with practical hard landscaping solutions. This year was no different for us, with 2010 CBMS Scholar Maria Luisa Medina collaborating with Bradstone and award-winning designer and TV personality, Chris Beardshaw, to create The Bradstone Fusion Garden
24 Garden & Hardware News
especially for the show. An unusual collaboration
between designers and technical experts, the Silver Gilt medal winning conceptual urban garden showcased a range of new cutting-edge product concepts designed specifically to convey the sheer flexible creative qualities of reconstituted stone. Featuring two stunning curved
louvered walls manufactured from stone products and a unique two-part heart sculpture designed using the same techniques, the garden attracted many admirers captivated by the sculptural elegance of the piece. The innovative use of aggregate
became somewhat of a theme across the show, and it was great to see so many other designers also embracing the use of hard landscaping products to maximise design impact. One such garden was The Lands’ End Across the Pond Garden, designed by Adam Frost, which proved to be a particular highlight. Adam’s gold medal winning
garden paid homage to the wonder of architecture and utilised polished concrete pads to great effect, forming stepping-stones across a pond framed by a falling wall of water. Inspired by the philosophy of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the acclaimed garden was apparently designed using Adam’s favourite materials, and was a prime example of how to accurately blend nature with the built environment. Elsewhere, the Best in Show and gold medallist Daily
Telegraph Garden by Cleve West heralded for the design qualities of both concrete and stone. Cleve is a great advocate for the use of hard landscaping to create stunning imagery in gardens. His work often features strong sculptural statements, with his Chelsea 2010 featuring giant concrete planters, and in 2009 a striking spherical centerpiece. This year saw the award-winning designer frame his design with dry-stone walls and three 10ft high columns modelled on Roman ruins. With an axed finish, the columns had the appearance of reclaimed artifacts but were in fact a clever mix concrete and terracotta. Of course not everyone who will have seen and been inspired by the gardens at this year’s Chelsea will have the room to make such grand statements in their own gardens at home. However, thanks to continuous product development, budding landscapers are now able to take that inspiration and recreate that Chelsea-feel on a much smaller, but equally as innovative scale. The themes and trends that
have been born out of Chelsea will continue to drive the development of products. Shows like Chelsea drive constant product innovation from manufacturers that will go on to transform gardens of the future. Thanks to Chelsea, it is clear to see that the future of gardening is bright, the future of gardening is paved with stone.
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