Hampton Court.qxp_Layout 1 20/07/2016 17:36 Page 1
SHOW | GARDENING
A GARDEN WITH A MESSAGE Eirlys Penn meets the Bath gardener who won a silver-gilt medal at the recent Hampton Court Palace Flower Show
F
or chartered landscape architect Emma Bannister, the germ of an idea to design for the world’s largest flower show was sown quite by accident. A contractor had objected to her close-planting on a north Bath project: “After all,” he said sniffily, “it isn’t a show garden.” Still niggled by this remark the next day, Emma raked over it again and again on a drive to London, and then suddenly realised that creating a garden for the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2016 would provide just the opportunity she had been looking for to help her favoured charity. A year on, with design partner Ben Donadel, she has just won a silver-gilt RHS medal for her efforts. The charity that Emma wanted to help was the National Association for Premenstrual Syndrome (NAPS), the only UK charity representing the interests of PMS sufferers. Emma’s 22year-old daughter, along with an estimated 800,000 women nationwide, has an extreme and debilitating form called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PDD). On the difficult route to diagnosis and beyond, NAPS has represented a lifeline for Emma’s family. But the small charity struggles to raise its profile: hence Emma’s motivation to help in a way that her particular skills allowed, through her first major show garden. It takes a year to bring a plan like this to fruition. Anyone can enter a garden for Hampton Court – in theory – though the reality of the application process demands professional-style layouts and 106 TheBATHMagazine
|
aUgUST 2016
3D images, plus the rigorous projectmanagement skills to implement those plans. This effectively rules out most amateur garden designers. As a qualified landscape architect, however, Emma had the skillset and rapidly formulated an idea which the Royal Horticultural Society duly accepted. In Emma’s garden design, Outside Inside, she proposed to include three forms of hazel to represent women, with willow structures exemplifying the hormones involved in ovulation, and an overarching structure depicting the brain and connecting the outer and inner garden areas. The outside portion – with regular native British plants – would illustrate a normal woman’s response to these hormones. Meanwhile, the inside would show a more extreme scenario, when a woman’s mental health can be threatened, and the varieties here would be distortions from the commonly occurring species: a contorted corkscrew hazel, for example, which Emma describes as the poster plant for PMS. An oval path would spiral into the garden, evoking the monthly cycle associated with ovulation, but also taking the visitor on a journey through the tortured process of suffering from and being diagnosed with PDD. To Emma’s delight, the RHS accepted her plan. Next, she had to secure sponsorship. The RHS does not want the embarrassment of 100 square metres of empty space at a flagship event so needs to know that exhibitors will deliver. Emma garnered backers and suppliers, in particular Monro Consulting and Holistic Services Insurance. The next hurdle was begging
and borrowing landscaping and plants, not least locating the specimen corkscrew hazel (corylus avellana Contorta) for the heart of the garden. The whole project almost foundered when Emma had problems finding a sufficiently robust bent steel framework to support her willow screens. Fortunately, a Harrod Horticultural catalogue happened to land on her desk, and the fruit cage manufacturer’s bespoke division saved the day. The environment from mid-June is a world away from the eventual show, full of noise and earth-moving equipment. To the thrum and fumes of diesel generators (there’s no power on site – it’s a field), Emma and her contractors and volunteers worked the long daylight midsummer hours, 7.30am to dusk. The garden’s main structural elements came from Musgrove Willows on the Somerset Levels (who supply the National Trust, Natural England and the RSPB), shaped into the bespoke structures by Jay Davey. Jay used 100 ‘wads’ (or bundles) of willow for the garden structures which took him a
MEDAL WINNER: main picture, The Inside Outside charity garden designed by Emma Bannister in situ at Hampton Court Palace Inset, looking up through the Somerset grown willow Opposite page, a delighted Emma shortly after winning her silvergilt medal, inside the structure and native British plants used in the garden PICTURES: Joe Penn