This garden pays tribute to the 24 men of the Royal Parks and Palace gardens who lost their lives in the First World War. The tribute echoes the work of William Orpen, a wartime artist and writer, who was at the Somme in 1917. Returning to the trenches later, he observed the desolation and destruction of war being taken over by Mother Nature, depicting the scene in his paintings and writings.
This feature is made up of two spaces. First, a raw, desolate scene depicting the trenches, and the second, a landscape awash with trees and flowers. In this, the 100th anniversary of the War, a stone plaque will be unveiled at the show, and eventually taken to Brompton Cemetery to form part of a permanent memorial to the parks, gardens and grounds staff from across the UK who were lost in the Great War.