Roller coaster to Chelsea ... don't look now!

This trip to Chelsea is a true roller coater. Let's just hope I'm not due for a fall! After the worst and darkest period where I thought there was no way we'd be ready in time, I've just had the best couple of days of the project. It's all very slowly coming together. I'm on a real high.

The weather has been fabulous, which is motivating in itself because I love the sun. But it also means that my plants have really shot up. It's important that they're a good size by the show in May to receive the best marks. Plus the plants and grasses that should be in flower on judging day were looking like there was no way they would be advanced enough, but now it's looking like a good possibility. Let's just hope this good weather continues. This has happened before though - an early warm spring and then SNAP! - we're back in deep winter with deep frosts and all the little buds that have come out early are caught by the frost and shrivel and maybe die. My plants for the Chelsea garden are in greenhouses, so they won't get frosted, but any prolonged cold spell will slow their development.

The creation of my water-wall is coming on in leaps and bounds. The skeleton is being fabricated in steel as we speak by Terry and the lovely guys up at P Bird & Sons (Milton Keynes) Ltd. Plus, Steve Usher from the Irrigation Systems Company is going to create fabulous water effects to represent melting glaciers and water runoff. Everyone's more focused now that time is pressing and I'm really beginning to think that we can work together to craft a garden that will be as different as it is beautiful.

It is definitely a SHOW garden! But that's what garden shows are all about isn't it? Visitors to the show can get ideas about planting associations that they can use at home, but the structure of the garden is a statement that wouldn't necessarily transfer to the garden of a semi in Bromley. I just hope everyone enjoys it for what it is. I'm certainly enjoying creating it (this week!).

Linda Bush is a garden designer based in Kent.

www.lindabush.co.uk/chelsea.html

Friday 13th and the garden’s not rosy

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