Chelsea 2007
Stephen Anderton:
'A Tribute to Linnaeus' designed by Ulf Nordfjell.
It’s tempting to think that Chelsea judges should give a mark for simplicity in their score cards because some gardens indulge so much in complexity. One feels rather prissy and unambitious saying so, yet no one would disapprove of a garden where the elements of design had been economically used and edited – and surely that is a form of simplicity.
It’s not that over-complex, fussy gardens involve more areas of expression than simple gardens – space, colour texture, light, narrative sequence, plant materials and hardscape materials – but that they do too much with too many of those areas. They do not let a few speak loudest, and take necessary account of the rest but use them less powerfully. They try too hard. They have to show they can use them all.
It might not be a bad for any garden to start from a default position of absolute simplicity. Only then would certain elements be expanded and explored, as and when the design required them. I get the feeling that this was what had been done by Ulf Nordfjell in his Linnaeus Tercentenary Garden at Chelsea this year. Nothing was unnecessary, but it was not bleak or lacking in interest (a few years ago Tom Cooper, editor of Horticulture magazine in the USA, left Chelsea show one lunchtime to visit a rather discreet garden in north London; he came back saying ‘Sometimes, less is less!)
Nordfjell’s plant colours were mainly green and white, in plants favoured by Linnaeus himself, and giving a simple native feel to the garden. Bright colour only came from the screen wall, one side of which was a hard orange-pink like the outside of many Swedish houses. The other side of the screen wall was grey like a Swedish interior and, adjacent to this, plants were a little less restrained and more colourful. The garden combined a contemporary style with cool native planting, which makes a change from combining it with architectural exotics or endless grasses. The trunks of trees and the ‘doorways’ in the screen walls provided a powerful vertical contrast to the heavy, horizontal beams which made up the walls themselves, and the beams were heavy and rough enough to comfortable with the native planting, their steel frames sophisticated enough to suit a modern garden. Nothing was wasted and nothing overdone.
Interesting, then, to compare the Marshalls garden where extra elements seem to have been added wily-nilly. A green-roofed summerhouse with an orange wooden-framed door supported a pink-striped deck chair and was a backdrop to bright cherry-maroon glazed planters containing striped agaves; white zantedeshias stood lost in space and taller than the wall which should have backed them and made them shine; colour and texture were used profligately and wasted. The summerhouse was laudably built of gabions filled with recycled broken paving, except that the scale of the paving slabs within was infinitely too small to look comfortable on a wall that height; scale gave way to eco-propriety, when in fact both could perfectly well have been satisfied by using the right recycled materials. Crisp, white, low walls around the pond were imperfectly jointed and their would-be perfect lines lost. Unlike Nordfjell’s garden, ideas and features were added without thought to their necessity and the result became muddled. If every extra element had had to be justified before it was added, the garden might have said so much more for itself. As it is, one was left longing for simplicity.
Anne Wareham:
'A Tribute to Linnaeus' designed by Ulf Nordfjell.
Gardens at Chelsea are different from any gardens in the outside world for several reasons which are worth noting in relation to any criticism or comment on them.
Their planting is focused entirely on what can be presented in Chelsea week – plants are forced or held back by the suppliers. The gardens are ridiculously over planted and planted straight out of pots so that the result is closer to flower arranging than a representation of a growing garden. You can only visit these gardens from the outside – that is, not visit them at all. And you inevitably experience the gardens in the context of all the other gardens that are presented to you at Chelsea. It leaves me bewildered and overwhelmed - the major gardens are all in a row, cheek by cheek, so that you leave one and instantly you’re confronted by the next, and the next and..
All this makes them closer, perhaps, to paintings in a gallery and therefore to the popular concept of an ‘art form’ than a garden ordinarily achieves in the popular imagination. Add the inevitable ‘theme’ (wherever did that come from?) and the picture, one might say, is complete.
It is within that context that I selected the ‘Tribute to Linnaeus Garden’ to write about for thinkingardens. The gardens elsewhere, and especially the major gardens down the main avenue, were full of restless colour or incident and this garden came as refreshment. White and green dominated, but with touches of other colour in the purple/blue range. A touch of orange in the large, stylish wooden structure that ran overhead of the path which made the spine of the garden added the necessary edge.
Then there was pleasing pattern throughout the garden, using the basic restraint of rectangles, circles and straight lines. Three round white stone blocks, each with a different feature – a low fountain or small circular planting – to give that pleasure of difference within repetition echoed the rounds of three box balls. One square pool was full of dark water, the second of water running over pebbles – and in that, instantly reminding me of country streams. The formality of the garden gave way at the ends to a softening, wilder look reminiscent of the countryside, and this, as with the perforated timber blocks used in the large structure and the walls, referenced the Swedish woodland landscape and indigenous use of materials.
The choice of plants acknowledged Linnaeus and Sweden, and in this added to the painterly quality of the garden: not just attractive to look at but conjuring images and history. It was clearly easier to remind us of the Swedish countryside though than the remind us of Linnaeus. I could have done without the screens depicting pineapples and a portrait of, presumably, Linnaeus. Bit heavy-handed. The light echoes of Swedish countryside were one thing, but the effort to bring the Swedish botanist into the picture was the usual over literal, over ‘spelt out’ stuff which tends to come with ‘theming’ and is why we would be better off without it.
