Bangladeshi Allotment

Sponsored by

A3Landscape

Designed by

Jeff Travers (A3Landscape)

Built by

A3Landscape

Web

www.a3landscape.co.uk

This garden shows how sustainable Bangladeshi tropical vegetable gardening adapts tenaciously to London allotments within ramshackle enclosures.

To create a high quality design, Jeff Travers has formalised the garden into a small cubic parterre (a microcosm of Potager du Roi at Versailles - Wren’s inspiration). Strange plants and curiosities parody the formal indulgence of Western gardening culture, and Laugier’s iconic hut becomes a “dooghie-house”. The garden consists of recycled structures for beans and gourds around a herb lawn edged in amaranth (dooghie) and coriander, to Laugier's formal principles. Though cheerful from
the outside, within it is sombre, with funereal white-flowered gourds and dark beans symbolising Bangladesh’s increasing floods and England’s allotments lost to unproductive municipal landscaping. Only sunflowers conjure hope.