2023 People’s Choice Award & Gold Medal – Renter’s Retreat
Garden Designer Zoe Claymore entered the “Get Started” category with the Wildlife Trust sponsored garden “The Renter’s Retreat”
The garden features elements which can be fitted through a front door – ideal for a terraced property with no side or rear access. All elements can be dismantled and reassembled for those renters who may move in a year or so. Zoe, a tenant herself, wanted to build a garden to encourage renters to make the most of what little outside space they have and prove what can be achieved with a small area and budget.
The garden also featured a crab apple tree (potted) a hügelkultur mound (permaculture method), a raised pond and log planters. The choice of plants and flowers were suitable for shady areas and attract pollinating insects.
Since the Flower Show, elements of the garden have been taken down and re-installed at the Centre for Wildlife Gardening in London.
2022 Best Global Impact & Silver Gilt Medal – What Does Not Burn
Ukrainian Garden Designer Victoria Manoylo designed What Does Not Burn with the help of her friend Carrie Preston. The garden was built by Frogheath Landscapes.
The garden features a burnt out cottage, covered in rushnyks, a traditional Ukrainian cloth. At the centre of the cottage is a tryzub sculpture, resembling what can’t be burnt. Surrounding the cottage is naturalistic planting including barley and field maple. A lot of the grasses came from fields and the green roof at Frogheath Landscapes.
2022 Gold Medal – Lunch Break Garden
Inspired Earth Design created this wonderful garden which was built by Frogheath Landscapes. This garden was Gold Medal Winning in the “Get Started” Category.
The garden draws on the experience of the designers working from home during the pandemic and recognising the therapeutic benefits that gardening offers.
The planting palette is vibrant and diverse yet restricted to eight herbaceous selections. Planting is complimented by raised steel planters of varying heights which were built by a fabricator close to Frogheath’s Burwash base.
2022 Silver Medal – Turfed Out
Turfed Out was designed by Hamsah Adam Desai and built by Frogheath Landscapes. Entered in the “Get Started” category, this was Hamzah’s first Show Garden.
This garden was designed with the beginner gardener in mind. Perhaps someone of a new build home who wants a simple but impactful first garden.
Low maintenance, the garden featured many drought tolerant plants and flowers to attract pollinators. It featured a simple rusted metal basin filled with water, with rock inside on which the pollinators could land, rest and take a drink. Left over builders materials like bricks were used to make insect hotels.
After the show, a lot of elements of the garden were re-used as part of a new reading room at a school near Hamzah’s home in Hackney.
2021 Bronze Medal – Garden of Solitude
The Garden of Solitude was designed by Italian designer Carlotta Montefoschi and landscaped and planted by Frogheath Landscapes.
In a flower meadow, shaded by the leafy foliage of two trees, 18 pots in the shape of Ionic columns, each with differing heights, are arranged at irregular intervals around a circle 6 metres in diameter. Lush plants cascade from the pots.
Look closer and two planting schemes characterise this small garden: A wildflower meadow incorporates groups of shrubs, herbaceous and grassy plants and is sheltered by two trees, all planted in random fashion. Together they present a naturalistic setting. In marked contrast are the single-species potted plants that follow, at irregular intervals, the precise geometry of the circle.
Inside the circle is a chaise longue while in the background is a sky-blue wall. This intimate and protected inner circle represents solitude intended in a restful space – an ideal condition for the development of thought and imagination.
2016 People Choice Award – Katie’s Garden
The garden demonstrated how to grow flowers in a small space for picking and arranging – a central bubbling water feature represented the lymph drainage system and was intended to draw the visitors’ attention to the vital work of Katie’s Lymphedema Fund.
2015 Gold medal – Synaesthesia Garden
This garden was contained within a white canvas dome, representing the inside of a synesthetes head. Once inside the dome the garden was washed with different coloured lights in response to trigger words that were projected onto the inside of the dome, echoing the multisensory experiences of a synesthetes.