Shot! The best artforms at the 2022 RHS Chelsea Flower Show
The world’s most prestigious floral event isn’t just about flowers, and this year there was one thing that made a big impression: texture was all the rage.
Spotting trends at Chelsea is usually confined to things like choice of flowers, planting styles, colour schemes and features on the gardens. In recent years, we’ve witnessed a growing trend towards naturalistic planting, from formal gardens to those that aim to faithfully recreate the natural landscape. We’ve seen a flood of water features, a cornucopia of corten steel and, last year, an abundance of wood being used in the show gardens.
As Chelsea returned to its regular Spring date after two Covid-interrupted years, I sensed a new trend amongst the show gardens. With designers giving regular sneak peaks of what they were doing on social media, gone are the days when all you’d seen in advance of the show was an artists’ impression. In many ways that’s a shame, because everything was a discovery on the day, but it does mean you now come better prepared. And through these visual tidbits it was clear that texture was going to be a big thing this year.
And that gave me a rough idea about what I’d be photographing at Chelsea: my focus was going to be on all things textural. That meant I’d be seeking out those objects at the show which had distinctive surface characteristics, whether that be hard landscaping, garden artworks or natural vegetation.
In a previous post I’ve written about my five standout Chelsea show gardens so there will be some recurring subject matter here, but this isn’t about considering an overall garden design, or its planting, it’s about honing in on some of the textural qualities featured on them as well as on other exhibits around the 23 acres of show grounds.
Before detailing the textures that stood out to me, it’s worth considering just what texture is all about. At its most basic, texture refers to the surface quality of a material. And when it comes to design, it’s the art of blending the rough with the smooth to create accents. In other words, how an object or section of a space is able to draw attention to itself. Along with colour and shapes, the use of contrasting textures is one way to ensure particular aspects stand out more than others. Above all, textures help to keep a space from feeling flat or one dimensional.
So with that, let’s take a look at the first texture I was drawn to at this year’s Chelsea. It was on the MIND Garden by Andy Sturgeon, one of my favourite garden designers. His gold-medal-winning show garden for the mental health charity featured numerous curved walls. In neutral shades of whites, beiges and creams, these walls were rendered with lime mortar and crushed sea shells to create a series of rough horizontal bands. While I could see what he was aiming for, personally, I didn’t feel they looked special enough. That being said, it depended how far away you were.
From a distance, the rendering was so subtle you could hardly make it out, closer up it looked much the same as any roughly rendered wall might look like. Admittedly, the weather on press day was dull and overcast and the lack of sunlight no doubt did the garden no favours.
While textures require shadows to enhance their features, one cannot rely on the sun to be shining all the time.
Another texture on Andy’s garden that I was interested in seeing were Johnny Woodford’s charred wooden benches. Unfortunately these were mostly obscured from view either by the curved walls or by people sitting on them, unless of course you had the opportunity to go onto the garden itself, which I didn’t.
I did however get to go on three of the show gardens, which makes a huge difference to how you appreciate their details.
One of the best I visited was Tom Hoblyn’s Travel Garden for Boodles. Tom is another of my favourite garden designers and his sanctuary garden for the jewellery retailer was a real gem. It was filled with textures.
Running through the garden was a serpentine rill that featured an unusual rippled effect. This beautiful water feature — built by Bamber Wallis — was one of the visual highlights of this year’s show.
Alongside it, Tom’s impeccable planting featured specimens from around the world including some gorgeous hostas whose leaves have some of the best textures of any plant. Perhaps the most interesting leaf on display belonged to Podophyllum Verspelle aka Spotty Dotty.
And then there was the garden’s striking specimen tree, an Acer Davidii aka the Snake Bark Maple. This stunning maple is native to China and has a truly unique texture: an eye catching green and silvery-white striated bark that resembles snake skin.
But what literally left the most memorable impression on me was Tom’s fern wall. In many ways, it was simple idea, using large ferns to imprint their shapes on a concrete wall and then painting it dark brown. It looked fabulous — reminding me a little of fossils found in rocks — and provided a wonderful backdrop to the verdant planting.
Speaking of green, while at Chelsea I always visit glass artist Carrie Anne Funnell. Her stunning kiln-fused artworks are beautiful to behold. She has such a distinctive style and I love the colour palettes she works with.
This year I was drawn to a new work of hers which Carrie Anne explained was inspired by the colours of Cambridgeshire, where she has her studio. Within her glass she manages to encapsulate air bubbles, glistening specks of gold and other fragments which give her work such a unique look.
Another of my favourite artists exhibiting at Chelsea was Essex-sculptor John O’Connor. I’ve been photographing his human forms with elongated limbs for years and always try to put my own spin on the finished images. This time I gave his bronzes an especially vibrant colour scheme!
John’s bronzes all have his signature rough textured finish which immediately set his work apart.
By far the biggest sculpture on display at the show was John Everiss’ pilot statue on his Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund Garden. As a piece of art it was eye-catching, although its connection to ‘gardening’ was tenuous at best.
What I liked about this 12ft, 3-ton statue was its unusual form — it was made up of 250 layers of stainless steel. This gave its undulating surface a very distinctive look.
Another very distinctive look — also made of metal — dominated the Morris & Co Garden, which I spent some time on. Originally conceived to coincide with the 160th anniversary of the founding of the company by Victorian artist William Morris, Ruth Willmott’s garden used two of his iconic wallpaper patterns for inspiration. The most interesting was the use of Willow Boughs from 1887.
The focal point of the garden was an etched metal gazebo, laser cut with the floral design and powder-coated in a dark red paint colour called Dragonsblood. But Ruth also cleverly used the same laser cut design in the bottom of two water channels giving them a unique look.
The final three gardens that stood out for me, also featured water as a key part of their design, although each used it in very different ways.
Certainly, the most unusual was the Ice Garden. To be honest, John Warland’s reminder of the continuing disappearance of ice from the Arctic was more an installation than a garden. A large ice cube slowly melting to ultimately reveal a floral arrangement encased in ice.
For me, the most impressive part of it was how beautiful the surface of melting ice is as a backdrop to plants.
The show garden that impressed me the most this year was the Building The Future Garden designed by Sarah Eberle to showcase Medite Smartply, an innovative, sustainable wood panel product made largely from woodchip waste from the Irish sawmill trade.
This was a real show-stopper of a garden, a towering 6m tall cliff-like structure, inspired by natural vertical rock strata, was topped by three chutes impressively cascading water down to a diagonal pool.
Sarah’s gold-medal winning garden also had fabulous detailing.
Everywhere you looked there were interesting textures, with clever use of Smartply which looked more like weathered-steel than wood.
The rust-coloured hard landscaping was softened with the use of jungle-like foliage, verdant ferns and mosses.
Walking through this edge-of-forest garden was like stepping into another world. It was more like a movie set than a show garden. Indeed its curvaceous form reminded me of Thomas Heatherwick’s iconic East Beach Cafe.
Last, but not least, was the diminutive Swiss Sanctuary garden designed by Lilly Gomm who used several large rocks as a representation of Alpine mountains. Unlike all the surface treatments of the other gardens that I’ve featured in this textured curation, here we had something that was not man-made, but a natural creation. As good as they looked, however, it was somewhat of a letdown to learn they had come not from Switzerland, but were actually glacial boulders from Wales!
Of course there were many other textures to be seen at Chelsea, but time is always against you on press day and it’s simply not possible to see everything that’s on display. But then, as they say, you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth!
Behind the shot: These images were taken either using the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the M Zuiko 1.8 75mm lens or the iPhone 12. Over the years I’ve tended to focus on tight compositions when shooting show gardens, floral displays and artworks at Chelsea and Hampton Court. The challenge as always is to come away from the show with a set of interesting images that are different from those taken by all the other photographers there. Photographed at Royal Hospital Chelsea on 23 May 2022
About the author: Based in Sussex-by-the-Sea, on England’s south coast, Gary is a creative writer and image-maker. He specialises in out of the ordinary portraits of musicians and people with interesting faces, as well as photographing some of the world’s finest flowers and gardens. On the writing side, he also penned deep dives into some of his favourite songs beginning with Bryan Ferry’s ‘These Foolish Things’ ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials and ‘All The Young Dudes’ by Mott the Hoople. Most recently, he has written a biography of Robert Palmer and the story behind Whitesnake’s ‘Still Of The Night’. All these can be found here on Medium, along with his reviews of gigs and events and chats with musicians.
