RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008: Live coverageRHS Website

Thinkingardens

Thinkingardens- transcript

Anne Wareham:  One of the most important features of this garden are the amazing and expensive trees.

Corinne Julius:  It’s a reference, isn’t it, to the Japanese garden, which is quite interesting in what is a very Western garden.

Stephen Anderton:  Yeah, but in a Japanese garden these kinds of trees have poise because they rise out of nothing, they look balanced, whereas this sort of frothing around out of it all, it… it needs a breather.

Corinne Julius:  On the other hand, I think the foliage is actually very interesting and I particularly like the use of the very different leaf shapes.

Stephen Anderton:  It’s very nice to see the water actually more formal than its surroundings too.  It’s good.

Anne Wareham:  Yeah.

Corinne Julius:  I think the tanks are really beautiful because they’re very smooth and you get wonderful reflections in the water even with just the tiny tremble of the breeze.  One suspects that it’s probably going to come out as best in show.  But for me, I think he’s a wonderful plantsman, he’s a great designer; there’s just too much happening.  But I think we should go on and look at some of the other gardens, which have, for example, the Arabella Lennox-Boyd garden which uses water again, but by contrast is actually a very large space with almost nothing in it.

Corinne Julius:  This garden actually is a bit confusing to me because when I first saw it yesterday, I looked at it and thought what a lovely space, but the more I’ve seen it the less I actually like it because it has a huge use of space but somehow it isn’t sculpting that space.

Anne Wareham:  The shape of the waterlilies and the path work well, but I don’t know how much you’d want to walk down them, do you?

Corinne Julius:  Well, it isn’t a real garden, it’s again taking the Chinese and Japanese use of rocks, isn’t it?

Stephen Anderton:  I actually want to take even more away, although this is a fairly minimal set up.  I would actually lose the lilies, you know.

Corinne Julius:  If you’re going to be minimalist, then be minimalist and when you get back to that planting back there, to me, that isn’t really working.  That’s what you’d call frothy.

Anne Wareham:  It’s fussy, frothy, there’s too much of it and it’s out of proportion because that’s a fussy little end to an enormous big plain of space.

Corinne Julius:  The Japanese garden, the moon garden, gives us, I think, a much better impression of what you can do on a small scale.

Stephen Anderton:  Garden in the Silver Moonlight.  What do you think?

Anne Wareham:  It’s lovely, wonderful.

Stephen Anderton:  I just think this is so simple and polished, I really do.  It’s almost all in one plain and yet everything is done in reflection, slight changes of surface level as you go round.  It’s beautiful.

Anne Wareham:  Complexity without fussiness.

Stephen Anderton:  It is, and wherever you look outside or inside this garden there’s a beautiful composition and that is the great skill.

Corinne Julius:  What I really like about it is these sculptures over here for example.  I mean, they look..  they’re cedar, they look a little bit… they have a sort of vague resemblance to sort of fish that you might find in a Japanese garden.

Anne Wareham:  It’s also interesting use of a very difficult site, I think.

Corinne Julius:  It’s real thinking about design and that for me is really important in a garden.

Stephen Anderton:  Sometimes less is more and sometimes less is less.

Anne Wareham:  Which are you claiming this to be, Stephen?

Stephen Anderton:  This is less is more!