What's Modern Now: Axes, Focal Points and Plants at Chelsea

Thomas Hoblyn's Garden Inspired by Italian Renaissance Garden has a strong Axial Design

Tom Swift's Had a Series of Cedar Structures with an Axis and Focal Point

Sarah Price's Garden evoked the beauty of wild areas of the British countryside and employed a long axis without a Focal Point.

Cleve West's Best of Show winning design has a strong central axis and celebrated the heritage of British gardening

View of the Focal Point of Cleve West's Garden

This Long Axis View in Andy Sturgeon's Garden without a Focal Point, looked , to me, a lot like the Price Long Axis

Arne Maynard's Garden had a Modern Focal Point (photo credit RHS)

The informal feeling planting in Cleve West's Garden

Hoblyn's low perennial planting

Sturgeon's plantings in front of the pool with distracting copper Bubble "energy wave" sculpture 

Lush planting in Maynard's Garden

Price's planting in the Telegraph Garden

Diarmuid Gavin's 'Magical Garden' was a giagantic 7 level pyramid without axes but one enormous ego-satisfying focal point that could be seen from any point on the grounds at the flower show

Another garden without an axis: Jihae Hwang's garden commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Korean conflict

Chris Beardshaw's garden inspired by the Furzey Gardens did not utilize an axis in its design

I am a sucker for strong axes and focal points in garden design. I think that is why I like English gardens so much. They almost always have a very clearly articulated design which I find appealing and probably reassuring. As we walked through Hidcote, Barnsley House, Sissinghurst and the other gardens on our tour, I asked the participants to looks for axes and focal points and encouraged them to sit in every chair or bench available to discover design elements.

I decided, as we entered the 2012 Chelsea Flower Show, to compare the designs (especially if they employed axes and focal points) and the plantings of the show gardens and determine if anything ground breaking was introduced this year. 

Nearly all the gold winning designs had a single axis with a focal point. Many also had cross axes perpendicular to the main axis. Most of the gardens had hedges and some sort of topiary. Interestingly, the herbaceous plantings were very similar as well. They tended to have a low naturalistic meadow feel with a mauve/pink, purple and/or purple-brown palette of planting. Few bright colors were used. This type of planting was reminiscent of many of the gardens I remember from last year's Chelsea Show.

As a whole, I thought the designs were well-executed and the plants were in excellent condition. However, I felt like many of the gardens felt very similar and the designers seemed to be playing it safe this year. Except for Diarmuid Gavin's 'Magical Garden', which I found rather odd, nothing seemed to be breaking new ground.

Three Favorite Views at Chelsea

The Laurent-Perrier Garden designed by Luciano Giubbilei

Irish Sky Garden designed by Diarmund Gavin

The Daily Telegraph Garden designed by Cleve West

We spent the last day of The Best of English Gardens tour at the Chelsea Flower Show. We arrived on site as soon as it opened and were able to take a look before the throngs of people descended. It was a gorgeous day and a very comfortable temperature.

Almost every display garden had something that I admired but several had elements that I didn't think enhanced the gardens. Diarmund Gavin's beautiful garden employed a distracting "pod" or floating garden that was lifted into the air by a gigantic crane. It came off as more of a publicity stunt than inspiring gardening. That is unfortunate because I liked the rest of the garden very much. The garden consisted of a pleasing combination of yew, boxwood and hornbeam topiaries mixed with drifts of ornamental grasses.

The Laurent-Perrier Garden designed by Luciano Giubbilei was one of the best gardens, I thought. This Italian designer is known for impeccable formal spaces with very little herbaceous material. He broke away from that formula with two tasteful and harmonious herbaceous borders that felt very English. I thought the boulders sculpted by Peter Randall-Page were striking. The garden also had a dozen mature Parrotia persica specimens which were limbed up in a very elegant fashion.

The Best in Show Award went to Cleve West's garden for the Daily Telegraph. West's garden had a Roman ruin theme and had several stone columns created by pair of sculptors from the south of France named Serge Bottagisio and Agnes Decoux. The columns were inspired by the Roman ruins at Ptolemais, in Libya and the garden walls were made of golden Cotswolds stone. The sumptuous and subdued herbaceous planting complimented the wall which was painted a mellow golden color.

I was sad to see The Best of English Gardens tour end but I am anxious to return to my own garden to try put some new ideas, inspired by the tour, into place.