RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008: Live coverageRHS Website

Urban Gardens 1

Urban Gardens 1 - transcript

Carol Klein: Urban gardens are designed to bring innovation to the city landscape at ground level or on rooftops, and they certainly do that. They’re all the same size but the wealth of creative designs is amazing. For many designers this is their first taste of building a garden at Chelsea, and although they’re on a much smaller scale than the show gardens, I’m pretty sure that the pressure to succeed must be just as great.

Carol Klein:  How’s it been going?

Rachel de Thame: It’s been going slowly. I have to say I take my hat off to everybody who does this, I mean it’s so full on isn’t it? You know, it’s so intensive.

Carol Klein:  Yes. There’s so much detail and so much beauty you know in some of your design like this lovely wall but it’s maybe taken a bit longer than you’d hoped.

Rachel de Thame: Well it took us six days just to do the slate. For me it’s about the plants so what I tend to do is to stick up a list and then I want lots of plants and I find it very hard to say no if a plant is beautiful. So that’s probably what I’ll learn from this is that actually sometimes less is more.

Carol Klein:  Because you colour scheme’s just so restrained and so lovely, it really is.

Carol Klein:  Designed by recent students from Capel Manor, Ratty’s Refuge is an urban garden that provides a green haven for the people and wildlife. In particular, the endangered water vole.

Ann Robinson: This year is the centenary of ‘The Wind In The Willows’ and we were inspired by the character of Ratty, who is a water vole, to design a garden to highlight the plight of the water vole. Water voles are endangered mammals, in fact the most endangered mammal in the UK at the moment, and we wanted to inspire gardeners to play their part in creating a refuge for them to help them to escape from predators.

Carol Klein:  Barry Mayled has designed the perfect rooftop eerie for an astronomer complete with a mini observatory and powerful telescope for exploring the wonders of the night sky. Green roofs are still a novelty in Britain but with ideas like these, a rooftop revolution could be just around the corner.

Carol Klein:  If you need a solution for disguising ugly concrete walls then look no further than Phillippa Probert’s garden. Here, living walls hide any boring surfaces and a living roof covers the seating area.

Phillippa Probert: My inspiration for this garden came from vertical gardens. I’ve tried to use plants that most people have in their gardens like geraniums and alchemillas, lots of Heucheras, and really try and make a patchwork of colours, shapes, textures and have lots of flower heads as well for added interest.