Electric Green

My local municipal flowerbed, back when it used to be fun. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about municipal planting and garden design in public spaces. It is an opportunity to bring style, excitement or just a bit of beauty to the masses; and one that is usually left to languish in unkempt evergreen scrub. This is somewhere that a little planning and creativity could reap dividends, but the norm is either uninspired, high maintenance and wasteful, or both. Just up the road from me is a long curved flowerbed in a small public garden adjacent to a roundabout. It used to be fun, it really did. When I first met it, someone had put in some thought and the late summer display looked so good in a soft morning mist that I went home and came back with a camera. This is the same flower bed as below, five years earlier. It wasn’t a challenging or intellectual display, the plants are all quite ordinary but it had a cheerful flair and pizzazz. And then they dug the whole lot...

'Never Mind The Hollyhocks' Award Winning punk-themed conceptual garden by Naomi Slade Why a punk garden? Why not?! I had never seen one and it seemed like a good idea. And was it a good idea? Yes. Very. It turned out looking exactly like the picture in my head. And, (as I believe I have mentioned) I won a Gold Medal and Best Garden In Show. And people kept going past quoting Sex Pistols lyrics, which amused me enormously. So much for a decent upbringing! You describe yourself as a career conceptualist. Will you help me with my career? No. I find I have iterated concepts, often quite abstract ones, throughout my own career. In a ‘can’t really help myself’ sort of way. I see no sign of this stopping, although it is fairly under control. Are you mad? Quite possibly, but modestly entertaining , I hope. So why The National Gardening Show? I designed the garden as a conceptual garden for RHS Hampton Court, but I didn’t submit it for 2012 because I kn...

I also took some pictures of moss and lichen It looks like I have entered into a diabolical pact over trees and tree planting. I am designing a new section of the garden and a battle has been raging over a large native willow, which represents an important visual anchor point in the design. Now, I don’t want this particular willow. It is nothing special, there are millions like it and I have a policy of swapping trees I don’t want, eg self-set ash and sycamore, with nice, posh trees that I do*. But I had planned to leave it there for the time being until I had decided on a replacement. This is a source of contention as someone else wants it gone with all speed. Part of this plan involves using a JCB to improve drainage and create a terraced valley with access to the stream. When it comes to diggers I am very conservative. They can be something of a blunt instrument and, in my experience, ‘people’ get them in and then the entire project starts to suffer from mission cree...

You don't want to see everything at once... This may appear esoteric even by my own standards but bear with me. I have a point, nay an academic principle to propound. And I have been thinking about this for a while. Garden design is a bit like stripping*. The posh sort, of course, but getting your kit off nevertheless. In the same way that you don’t (so I am led to believe) see a lady walk on stage, drop her metaphorical towel, go ‘ta dahh!’ and walk off again, you want a garden to tease you a bit. The concept is well known, garden rooms are ten a penny, but the comparative epiphany came when I recently visited a garden that needed a little mystery. It showed its, undeniably outstanding, best feature off immediately ...but then there was nothing much left to keep you hanging on. Really good gardens are the ones that keep you guessing. The ones that captivate, that go on and on with surprise views, distant temptations and sudden flurries of excitement and beauty. The...