Well I don’t know about unlucky, but I’ve heard it all now … in order to cut the cost of a garden I have designed for a private client, he asked me to take all the plants out! Apparently he thinks he’ll kill them all anyway, so it would be a waste of money. I considered offering him astro-turf for the whole garden, but I managed to hold my tongue. [In fact a little bird told me that someone once bought a house with a Christopher Bradley-Hole garden and promptly astro-turfed the lot. Christopher has 5 gold medals at Chelsea and his gardens are a delight]. I guess because I love plants so much I can’t understand someone wanting a garden without them. My ‘solution’ was to make the lawn larger and use Hypericum calycinum (St John’s Wort) where I really had to put plants. You’d have to work very hard to kill that. I guess it's very daunting for someone who knows nothing about plants. I grew up with them, so I find it hard to think of them as being scary at all. To me plants are living, loving, breathing pieces of nature that will reward any little care and love that they receive.Anyway, on to Chelsea (just had to get that off my chest, you know how it is). This week I made models of the ice/water wall to prove to myself that it’s really going to work the way I expected. I wanted to get some extra marks for difficulty and originality when I designed the garden, but I think I over-did it a bit. I’ve designed a huge wall covered with pieces of different coloured Perspex (kindly donated by Lucite) which will have water trickling over it to represent cracked and melted ice, like in the photo above. Fortunately my models proved it will work as expected, and construction has started. I’m sleeping much better now! 38 days to go (Blimey! Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?!)…
Linda Bush is a garden designer based in Kent.
www.lindabush.co.uk/chelsea.html
