Parakeets screech and planes rumble overhead, but my attention is on the plants at my feet: the tracery of herb robert, purple nibs of plantain, flailing bramble and bristly nettle. I’m sitting on a boulder in a clearing among hawthorn, privet and silver birch. It feels a quiet space, one you might stumble on in the woods or are drawn to when you feel low, but is in fact at the Chelsea flower show.
The name of this garden is On the Edge for it evokes the edgelands, the fringes of where we live. Unprotected, modest places – not grand landscapes but ones that are close by towns and cities. Designed by Sarah Eberle, the garden marks the centenary of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the launch of the first interactive map of England’s countryside edges, a gathering of people’s stories and memories about place.
Dog roses are threaded through loops and swirls of willow that flow along a drystone wall. The willow represents the hair of Gaia, a giant sleeping figure carved from fallen redwoods by the chainsaw artist Chris Wood. There’s a scent of linseed from the recumbent sculpture, her bow-shaped lips and closed eyes serene and Buddha-like.
The willow weaves through mossy dead branches and embraces a slender tree trunk, Gaia’s hair emanating life throughout the garden glade. Local people are imagined caring for this place, enjoying its wildlings, its ferns and cow parsley, its buttercups, campion and ox-eye daises. There are naturalised plants from someone’s garden: the large palmate leaves of Rodgersia, pale jade globes of Angelica.
There’s unexpected beauty in leaf shadows moving over a concrete farm trough. Blotched with lichen, its rim broken by years of livestock drinking from it, the green duckweed surface is occasionally broken by dark rising water.
This is a show garden, designed to highlight the threat to urban edgelands. That it moves me, that it carries emotion, is its mark of success, and this CPRE garden won gold as well as best in show. These are the flowers of my childhood adventures down an abandoned lane, the snowball tree of my parent’s garden. My wish is for others to be able to experience these unremarkable yet special places.
