Chelsea Flower Show 2007

The Marshall’s Sustainability Garden

The garden combined a blend of recycled materials. These included scaffold boards, forming boundary walls, crushed glass, creating a pool surround with stepping stone’s and crushed concrete combined with excavated soil shaping a wildflower area. Other materials were of a more ethically sourced and sustainably managed nature, such as the sawn paving stones and crushed path gravels.

Set out on a diagonal theme, the garden took the visitor initially on a journey through the main planting borders. These combined culinary herbs, salad crops, herbaceous perennials, structural shrubs, and ornamental grasses. Vertical interest was added with the use of olive trees, grape vines and pyramidal glass/stainless steel structures. These represented the more formal shape of clipped “box” plants they also housed solar panels to generate electricity for the garden studio.

After passing through this mainly planted area the visitor reached a tranquil pool. Crushed glass stepping stone’s offered a route across the pool surface and onto the main hardwood deck.

Natural reed filtration beds and marginal plants worked to recycle grey water and softened the pool and deck area.

Finally a studio, partially buried in the spoil from the garden construction, offered both an indoor retreat and a small elevated terrace, amongst wildflowers and ornamental birch trees.

The garden was awarded an RHS Silver medal.