The best bits from our Malvern Show Garden
Creating a show garden for the RHS Malvern Show this spring was a fantastic experience. Now that we’ve had a chance to regroup and take stock, here are my favourite bits from the garden, which I definitely plan to include in designs for clients in the future.
Dead hedge
This was without a doubt our most asked about feature – the people visiting the show couldn’t stop talking about it! The joy of a dead hedge is that it’s really easy to make, cheap, attractive and creates an important wildlife habitat. We made ours with two rows of upright hazel sticks, and then filled the gap in between with hazel and birch branches, but you can add any prunings you have - the material in the dead hedge rots down and you can keep adding more to the top as you prune.
Creating mounds
The original site for the garden was flat, but we wanted the informal, wood chip paths to be a fun way for children to experience the garden, and creating mounds for the paths the run over and round made the space feel much more exciting to explore. Changes in ground level add interest, and if you’re having lots of ground work done you may have lots of excess soil that you need to deal with. Taking it off site can be expensive and less sustainable, so this can be a great opportunity for the creative inclusion of extra soil into your design.
An investment feature
The garden didn’t have lots of expensive hard landscaping, which was a purposeful choice to minimise the cost and environmental impact of the design, but we did choose to have one key path made with beautiful oak setts. This was more expensive than the other paths, which were self-binding gravel, but it really added a high quality feel to the space and was a real talking point.
Lots of green, lots of texture
The planting colour pallet for the garden included white and blue flowers, but the predominant colour was green, with eight different types of ferns, plus ground cover plants like epimediums and lamium. This made for a very calming space, and was still attractive to look at because of the use of different tones, leaf shapes and textures.
Fancy including some of these features in your garden? Get in touch to find out how we can help with a consultation or full design.