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Sometimes, it’s the garden that people quietly admire at the Chelsea Flower Show that wins Best in Show—and the prognosticators have to go back and have a rethink. That happened this year with a garden designed by young-yet-seasoned landscape studio Harris Bugg for the spinal injury garden charity, Horatio’s. The charity’s raison d’être is to provide quality outdoor space to patients in wheelchairs or on beds at the 11 hospitals in the UK that have spinal injury units, giving them a place of calm and a degree of privacy in a hospital setting. They have all been designed to a very high spec by the country’s leading garden designers, and Harris Bugg’s Best in Show winner at Chelsea is the beginning of what will be the eighth, in Sheffield.
Interestingly, the most talked-about gardens at this year’s Chelsea were probably Cleve West’s Centrepoint garden highlighting the plight facing young homeless people and Sarah Price’s garden based on the horticultural legacy of artist (and plant breeder) Cedric Morris. On press day, people were coming away from the Price garden saying that it was the most beautiful garden they’d ever seen at Chelsea. And yet—when all the judges’ points were tallied, Harris Bugg’s garden had done everything right and more.
Photography by Jim Powell.
Increasingly, judges have been putting value on a garden’s afterlife when the show finishes. This garden is not representational; the outbuilding is real, and it needed to be big enough for rotating a wheeled bed. “The garden is designed to be fit for purpose, to take apart and put back together again,” explains Charlotte Harris of Harris Bugg Studio. This will happen on what is currently a parking lot at the Princess Royal Spinal Cord Injuries Centre in Sheffield. The show garden is 72-feet by 33; the future garden will be eight times that size. Everything here will be moved lock, stock, and barrel, excluding the lower story of plants, which will be sold off (for the charity).
It’s a difficult brief for a show garden, to bring theater to practicalities. Paving had to be completely smooth, without joints and on a flat gradient. Harris Bugg also wanted it to be environmentally friendly so they produced permeable paving made from crushed and smoothed aggregate to create a terrazzo effect.
The garden was one of 14 gardens sponsored this year by Project Giving Back, a small but very targeted collective who provide sponsorships for charities that would not otherwise be able to justify the cost. They focus on “gardens for good causes” and a PGB-sponsored garden last year also took the top prize, the “beaver garden” more properly known as the Rewilding Britain Landscape.
The expectation for a garden for people with spinal injuries would be that it’s all a certain height. Charlotte Harris contests this: “It’s not necessarily low because people coming into it have a different field of vision. We just wanted people to be able to see through the garden.” It is densely planted, beneath trees that were chosen for their light canopies. Dappled shade creates a cooling atmosphere, as spinal injury patients can easily overheat.
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