RHS Watch This Space Garden

Did you know...

• Built by landscaping apprentices, trainees and students to highlight landscaping as a meaningful and rewarding profession for young people to gain valuable skills
• Garden elements gathered from storage sheds, barns and donated by designers Sarah Eberle and Cleve West, explore recent trends to re-use and recycle
• Dark and angular sculptured bronze fins evoke the feeling of the mountains with natural rock, water and soft muted planting nestled at their base

About the Garden

International award-winning designer Andy Sturgeon has created a series of interconnected gardens re-using and re-imagining a multitude of elements from the last decade of RHS Chelsea Flower Show gardens. 

Born out of a desire to re-use and recycle, the elements that make up these gardens have been hunted down and gathered up from storage sheds, barns and designers’ own gardens including those of Cleve West and Sarah Eberle, to be brought together at RHS Hampton Court Flower Show. The design is fluid and will not be fixed until the last plant is planted and gravel is placed. 
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The real purpose of this garden is to encourage youngsters into the landscaping profession, to address the recruitment crisis and to show that this is a rewarding and meaningful occupation for young people to choose when they leave school. Landscaping is a serious, multifaceted career choice that can reconnect young people with the outside and give them a wide-ranging skillset. 
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The RHS, together with APL, will be supporting BALI’s initiative GoLandscape to encourage more people to choose this exciting and rewarding career in the landscaping industry. The garden has been built by landscaping apprentices, trainees and students mentored by leading industry contractors giving them their first taste of building a show garden for a world-renowned designer.

Launched by BALI in 2016, GoLandscape works across the landscaping industry to promote and develop real life careers, share personal stories and projects and provide rewarding opportunities for people of any age, from all walks of life. GoLandscape provides a wealth of inspiring and educational career advice to young people, mapped to the UK government’s curriculum for the land-based sector and linked to the Trailblazer Apprenticeship Standards establishing a recognised qualification at land-based colleges throughout the country.
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The RHS together with APL is pleased to support the GoLandscape initiative and promote horticulture and landscaping as a viable long-term career path.

With thanks to volunteers from the landscaping industry and the GoLandscaping project in association with BALI. Also to Makita Tools for supplying the use of tools.