Chelsea 2008 proved to be a rewarding show for Inchbald graduates Haruko Seki and Philip Nixon. Haruko won a silver medal for her garden in the silver moonlight, the first contemporary Japanese garden to be featured at the Chelsea Flower Show. The garden celebrates the 150th anniversary of the diplomacy and friendship treaty between the UK and Japan. Inspired by the moon observation stage in Katsura Imperial Villa, the 17th century architectural masterpiece in Kyoto, the garden has been designed as a contemporary interpretation of the Japanese sense of beauty and closeness to nature.
Philips gold medal garden is Inspired by the Tate Modern, and the experience of the journey through its varied spaces, The Savills Garden examines the relationship between art and gardening. While preparing his design, Philip used the rhythm and geometry of pictures hanging on walls and sculpture on display in galleries to influence his thought processes. The garden itself is structured, geometric and randomly rectilinear. Both hard and soft materials define the geometry. The planting is predominately perennial with added accents of textural shrubs, including ‘frames’ of Buxus, and sculptural trees. The planting palette is varied to allow for contrast in colour and form.
Planting tutor Tom Hoblyn won Gold for his Tempest in a Teapot garden. Through the commemoration of Rossini’s death in 1868, this garden celebrates the 140th anniversary of the Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust. This basement garden is intended for an environmentally-concerned eccentric music lover to sit and view the ‘stage show’ that the garden provides visually and aurally. The design demonstrates how, with a medium amount of maintenance, a basement garden can provide a good environment for shade-loving plants with the use of saved rainwater.
Construction tutor David Dodd celebrated another win with a gold for building Andy Sturgeans garden. The Cancer Research UK Garden is a contemporary woodland garden, inspired by the enormous amount of progress that Cancer Research UK has made, and continues to make, in the battle to beat cancer. The progress of the organisation is represented by the inclusion of four large rectangular pools that increase in size from the front to the back of the garden. From within these pools, a series of computer-generated raindrop-like ripples create a sequence of movement from the rear of the garden, towards the front. The backdrop to the garden is a ‘thought wall’, a construction of shot-blasted and waxed steel rings, designed to symbolise the amount of research carried out by Cancer Research UK. This is placed in front of a cutting edge concrete render, made from crushed almonds, onto which the evening sun projects the bubble shapes of the thought wall.
