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Fortnum & Mason
The Fortnum & Mason Garden
Designer: Robert Myers
Sponsor: Fortnum & Mason
Contractor: Willerby Landscapes
Click here to view a panorama of this garden.
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The garden is a celebration of Fortnum & Mason’s tercentenary and designed to evoke entertainment and indulgence, blended together with wit, quality and history. The historic element is brought to life by looking forward at the brand’s future and mixes together references of contemporary design throughout.
The Fortnum & Mason Garden is ornamental, with rich, sumptuous planting, as well as a generous terrace for relaxation and entertainment. It incorporates four Fortnum beehives as ornamental features and functional items. Planting, which is predominately red, purple, pink and pale yellow, creates a sumptuous tapestry of rich colours and texture and is attractive to bees. Herbaceous plants and low shrubs create undulating waves and are planted in drifts, as preferred by bees. The planting will illustrate species suitable for dry conditions.
The garden is set out on a simple, axial plan, with a central grass path leading between two areas of planting to a paved terrace backed by a ‘green’ wall at the end of the garden. The wall is capped with a balustrade, and planted with pleached, feathered Liquidambar trees, trained around three shell and pebble grotto niches. Specimen shrubs in large ornamental pots frame the grottoes. Other pots on the terrace contain ornamental and architectural plants and the paving has wide joints, planted with low, velvet-textured brass buttons (Leptinella squalida ‘Platt’s Black’)
Either side of the steps, which lead from the terrace to the grass path, are two simple elegant square parterres of clipped box surrounding pools and fountains.
Above four ‘eau de nil’ coloured beehives, which stand in front of an oak and wicker fence, is a pleached hedge of lime trees (Tilia x europaea ‘Pallida’). Sinuous paths paved with pebble mosaics lead across the garden to each beehive, creating views and vistas.
After Chelsea the beehives will be located to the roof of the Piccadilly store for honey production. The beehives have been made especially for Fortnum & Mason and each celebrates a different neo-classical architectural style and is around 1.5m (5ft) tall.