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Laurent-Perrier Ltd
The Laurent Perrier Garden
Designer:
Jinny Blom
Sponsor: Laurent-Perrier
Contractor: Crocus
Click here to view a panorama of this garden.
Click on the image to view a hi-res version
This is a romantic contemporary French themed garden, exploring garden plants suitable for chalk or calcareous soils. It utilises styles of building and materials evocative of northern France with the emphasis on irises and peonies with stylised meadow planting.
Laurent-Perrier looked back to its roots in the chalky landscape of Champagne to create this French Show Garden. The garden celebrates how, from a seemingly weak and unyielding chalk landscape, a spectacular richness of growth can flourish and be transformed into fine wines in Champagne. The garden only includes plants that are chalk and lime tolerant and structures that are deftly crafted from natural chalk materials.
Taking inspiration from quintessential elements of decorative, lime-loving French gardens (including her own garden in France), Jinny Blom’s design for the Laurent-Perrier Garden blends the classical with the new, to create a stylish, romantic and peaceful French Chateau setting.
Soft, delicate planting, abundant with roses, irises, peonies and gentle wild meadow-flowers, is set within the formal structures of chalk rock (Totternhoe Clunch) walls, crafted by artist David Wilson. The garden combines the spontaneous, herbaceous planting with classic French stylistic statements, such as box-headed limes (Tilia).
Romantic colours have been carefully considered: pale creamy whites, blush and coppery tones are present around the terrace, deepening to clarets and pale blues in the meadow.
A key feature of the garden is a white metal-framed Gloriette echoing, in skeletal form, the undeniably French roofline of a hypothetical Chateau. An L-shaped pool represents a 'vivier' or typically French spring-fed trout pool.
Jinny sees Chelsea as the pinnacle of a gardener’s year and says that there is nothing like it and for a year one lives, eats and breathes the show garden.
If you like this garden, look out for Fran Forster’s The Perfumed Garden at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show (4-9 July). This stylish garden is in honour of Jean Patou, the famous Parisian couturier and creator of floral fragrances.