Designers flying high
18 November 2008
Twelve of Britain's leading garden designers will build show gardens for Future Gardens, a new annual competition run by Butterfly World, near St Albans in Hertfordshire.
They include Chelsea Gold Medal winner, Andy Sturgeon, and conceptual artist Tony Heywood – once described as 'horticulture's answer to Damien Hirst'. They beat off competition from nearly 100 entrants from all over the world for the chance to build their design for the four-month-long event, known as Future Gardens. Each designer also wins £25,000 towards construction costs.
'It's a great opportunity,' says Tony Heywood, who describes his garden as 'a graphic cartoonesque version of the English landscape'. 'I've been working on ideas for two or three years, so when this came up it was fantastic and really crystallised everything.'
The projects were chosen for their thought-provoking and sometimes radical approach to garden design, and many take inspiration from the natural world. Narratives of Nature, designed by Hugo Bugg and Maren Hallenga, will look at edible plants, while Paul Dracott's The Exoskeleton is based on what Paul calls 'one of nature's oldest and most successful structures'.
'The world of conceptual gardens can provoke a lot of thought and inspiration,' said leading designer Andrew Fisher Tomlin, one of the panel of judges that selected the designs. 'It was great to see so many amazing ideas.'
The organisers, TJM Associates, were also responsible for conceptual design showcase The International Festival of the Garden at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, and Future Gardens will run along the same lines. Show gardens will stay in place all summer, from June to September, allowing visitors to see them grow and mature as the season goes on. They will be replaced by a new set of gardens each year.
The first Future Gardens will be the opening event at Butterfly World, a 26-acre complex of gardens and meadows created by avant-garde designer Ivan Hicks and built around a giant biome filled with butterflies. The £25 million scheme is currently under construction, with the first phase due to open in June.