rhs gardens wisley, surrey 2004
award: the garden won a competition run by the Society of Garden Designers
duration: permanent show garden
size: 40m2
The brief was to design a relatively low budget garden for a typical plot of a new build house in the UK. I kept construction simple and the design is simple series of interlocking rectangles. Inexpensive Indian limestone paving is used in the foreground and also stacked for the leg of the bench which is an oak sleeper. The step up to the deck avoided the need for excavation. At the rear four hornbeams rise out of black basalt setts, and the canopies will knit together with time.
Beneath them a water feature is made out of drilled and stacked paving and the water flows into a small pool which puts space at the heart of this small garden. The wall at the rear is the focus of the garden and I made the wall sculpture from a slab of weathered oak with limestone tiles set into it to repeat the patterns of the rest of the garden.
