Awards
This garden was awarded
Gold
“Forest2”
Ivan Tucker
In conjunction with Guildford College, Merrist Wood Campus
This is a conceptual garden that attempts to create the illusion of a forest in a tiny corner of the showground, through the careful use of just 30 trees and parallel mirrors. Mirrors have of course been used in gardens before, but rarely on this scale.
The garden has three main themes: optical illusion; abstraction of a natural system; and our emotional response to forests, as revealed in both religious and secular literature. In the garden the natural elements of a forest are abstracted onto a square grid, and the dappled shade and formal structure offer a background for an exploration of foliage colour, form, scale and texture. The colour palette is deliberately muted, relying almost entirely on the many shades of green, with white and red as highlights.
The forest is often represented in literature as a place of encounter, and this is alluded to by the inclusion of two boulder seats, which echo the warm white of the tree trunks. On three sides of the garden, high mirrored walls multiply the forest to infinity, in contrast to the ongoing disappearance of real world forests due to our unsustainable stripping of the earth’s natural resources.
The purpose of the garden is to investigate the idea of abstracting the elements of a natural forest and transposing them on to a square grid, to manipulate them both spatially and in form. The trees and shrubs in the forest will be arranged on a strict grid, with woodland planting flowing between them in stylised natural swathes. Herbaceous plant material will be organised to give the impression of a forest with a clearing, albeit in a stylised manner. The garden is not intended to be primarily functional, but could be adapted to create space in an urban environment, or be a small secret garden within a much larger garden. Viewing portholes cut through the mirror walls at different heights allow the public to look into the garden from various positions and heights outside of it, and captions painted on the walls will draw reference to the forest in literature and invite and encourage people to investigate the garden within. The more or less continuous canopy of the trees will prevent too much light reaching the mirrors and being reflected onto the underplanting below, which will of course be forest/shade based.