Telegraph 2011

Show gardens are not real gardens. There’s no existing house and there are no existing landmarks or features from which to take reference or inspiration. You have to get everything looking just right on one day in the last week of May and you only have three weeks in which to build it. The fact that there are few restrictions on what can be built sounds great but in reality it’s this freedom, this blank page that often proves to be the biggest hurdle.

I’m not always clear as to where ideas for show gardens come from but in this case I feel sure that my subconscious was at work.

From the outset I was determined to use sculpted concrete ‘colonnes’ made by Serge and Agnes Bottagisio-Decoux. I had seen the columns when I first met them in 2005 but had been reluctant to use them in earlier show gardens for fear of over-egging the omelette.

A month or so after submitting my design, a contemporary sunken gravel garden, I chanced on a photo of my mother taken in Libya some five years earlier and before Gaddafi’s fall. Seated on a block of stone at the Roman ruins of Ptolomais among ruinous stone columns in a sunken space it was clear that I had re-interpreted this scene albeit with a contemporary twist. The fact that my mother had only recently died added fuel to the notion that I was subconsciously building a private memorial to her at the Chelsea Flower Show. How she would have loved the idea! Still raw from the sudden and untimely nature of her departure I kept this to myself largely for self-preservation but was grateful for the cathartic opportunity to celebrate the memory of a loved-one in such style.

The concrete ‘colonnes’ and water pipes together with some rather nifty stone walling but David Wilson gave the garden the intrigue I was looking for where traditional and contemporary dynamics gently collide.