GREENIN I
Hannah Genders
explores a garden project that aims to add greenery to our urban spaces.
knew that at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show there was going to be a feature by a bit of a hero of mine in the design and horticultural world. The feature
Alliums with Barbican behind
was called “Greening Grey Britain” and the RHS had sponsored the garden as a way of promoting a very important campaign about urban planning and green- space. The hero I mentioned, the man behind the design and many other fabulous gardens in previous years, is Nigel Dunnett. Nigel is well known as a cham- pion of planting up areas in cities to re-introduce flow- ers, biodiversity and wild- life, particularly through a style called “Steppe planting”. This is a style that cop- ies the arid meadows of northern Europe, with drought-tolerant plants that are closely planted to make
them lower-maintenance and allow them to grow tightly together creating a
drift like carpet of colour – it also uses a lot of bulbs to extend the colour season. One of Nigel’s signature plantings in this style was
Bee hotels in Greening Grey Britain garden
48 The Village July 2017
completed at the Barbican Centre in London in 2015, and although I had read plenty of articles about these plantings I had never seen them, so as a prelude to Chelsea I went along to see these borders for myself. I must say they were a little difficult to find, and after quite a long time of wandering through dark concrete corridors I found them in an area called The High Walks. For any of you who don’t know the Barbican, it is brutalist, 1960s concrete architecture, so to see these swathes of colourful plantings against such a harsh backdrop was wonderful. The beds are quite large with drifts of grasses and perennials like Salvia nemorosa, nepeta and euphorbia; these were pulled together with drifts of the allium Purple Sensation. Another grass that was in flower and looking really
good was Liberta grandiflora, which requires very lit- tle water and is evergreen with pure white flowers.
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