Il genius loci vale più del trend

by Anna Piussi

 

Brexit effect: this year’s big show gardens at Chelsea have been reduced in number, with more sponsors opting for medium gardens. Perhaps it’s good thing, because the past years have seen pharaonic excesses at Chelsea, with too much hard paving and structures. It’s not always the case, as Chris Beardshaw’s garden featured an enormous loggia and too many plants, implausibly planted, a distracting attention for each detail at the expense of a cohesion. Chelsea gardens are for show, but they must imitate the plants’ natural habitat, and you can’t put sun lovers in the shade of a Pine tree. Actually you can barely plant anything below them, because their only gift is dry shade and an avalanche of pine needles which you have to rake up. They are not easily domesticated, they place is in pine groves, parks and arboreta, along with the majority of other conifers, they are not easy in a garden proper. Despite this Pines are the stars of the show this year, and they recur in Charlotte Harris’s garden, inspired by Canada. Simple paving solutions, brutalist furniture and an asymmetric balance with plenty of negative spaces to balance the positive ones display they rugged beauty of the pines, for a highly successful garden. Equally inspiring is Matt Keightley’s garden which uses different cultivars of Pinus mugo, pruned tight into rounded shapes to contrast with upright forms, a good idea for contemporary gardens.

Chelsea should challenge our ideas and have us rethink our notion of gardens, not just promote new products and plants to insert into an increasing globalised landscape. James Basson explores the relationship between plants and man-made landscape, with a poetic interpretation of an abandoned stone quarry, colonised by weeds. It shows the beauty that can be found, not in an idealised untouched garden of Eden, but in what is generated by the symbiotic relationship of humans with nature, as Nature explosively reclaims its space as humans carve out their lives within her. A well deserved Gold and Best in Show.