What is garden style?
Extract from Take Chelsea Home by Chris Young
Over the years the RHS Chelsea Flower Show has helped to endear us to many garden styles. From cottage gardens to formal areas, wildflower meadows to contemporary spaces, the gardens have used an array of styles, materials and ideas. Yet, increasingly, few gardens fit easily into a pigeon hole of a defined style, because designers have blended elements of different genres into their exhibits.
Some of these mixed-style gardens are themed and relay a message, while other types of show garden might be artistic or conceptual. Either way, they may use formal or romantic elements (for example), but they can’t be defined as a formal or romantic garden per se. And it is often this amalgamation of styles that makes the RHS Chelsea Flower Show so utterly absorbing, as visitors question what they see and think differently about a preconceived notion of a particular garden style.
Formal
There is an ingrained sense of grandeur, balance and structure in formal gardens. For a vast number of people this is fundamentally appealing, yet for others such gardens can be too rigid and unemotional. Maybe the attraction of formal gardens relates to the gardener’s dominance over the natural landscape, or possibly it is because there is a natural aesthetic that balances scale and proportion, which sits comfortably with a viewer’s eye.
You can easily introduce an element of formality into your garden, by including rounded box balls, tightly clipped hedging and restrained planting. The only challenge most gardeners face, however, is to maintain the self-discipline that is needed to keep within formal design principles.
Magical and mad
Sometimes designers just want to throw away the shackles of tradition. Maybe they have been inspired by a painting or song, or perhaps they have had a great idea but never until RHS Chelsea Flower Show had the opportunity to build on it. Either way, these types of show gardens make for great effect.
Minimalist
This style can often be the most divisive at Chelsea for it polarises popular opinion. Supporters respect the clean lines, the unfussy nature of the planting, the thoughtful selection of materials, the fact that such gardens can be conveniently low maintenance and the consideration given to every element in such gardens. By contrast, detractors state that this contemporary style is soulless, impersonal and, because it often uses a minimal material palette, uninteresting.
Whatever your take, there is no doubting the thought that designers give to create such impressive spaces. Colour can be vivid, bold and almost garish; at other times the range may be cooler, calmer and restrained.
Wildlife
Some designers use the RHS Chelsea Flower Show to emphasise the importance of wildlife in the garden and provide an understanding of how wildlife fits into the wider environment. This is often done by imparting a specific message – the reasons to garden organically or to attract certain types of wildlife, for example – or by showing that wildlife and gardening can be in harmony. Research is confirming that a balanced mix of plant types and areas of hard landscaping can offer a great habitat for wildlife.
Fortunately, a diverse range of garden styles can offer attractive homes for a wide range of creatures, so overall design doesn’t have to be compromised. By looking closely at the gardens on display at the show, you will discover how wildlife and gardening integrate when sharing the same area. Your garden can relate to this approach, as long as it has varied garden elements and some hard landscaping.
Take Chelsea Home by Chris Young and foreword by Alan Titchmarsh is published by Mitchell Beazley.