Trentham Gardens and Adventure Play - Chelsea Flower Show 2005

In conjunction with our designer Tom Stuart-Smith and our sponsorship partner Laurent-Perrier, Trentham Leisure Ltd is delighted to announce that our Show Garden won a gold medal at the Chelsea 2005 Show.

Here Stephen Lacey describes the award-wining garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith.

As at Trentham, the garden played historic design elements and materials against modern, and formality against naturalism. From Main Avenue, the twin vistas appear fairly straightforward. Hornbeams form a tunnel over a smooth corridor of stone, a grey alpine schist called Pietra della Cardosa, while alongside are the contrasting soft ripples of meadow-like planting.

But walk along the Side Avenue, and suddenly these vistas separate out into a harmony of separate consituent parts, in true modernist style. The tunnel is exposed as a series of individual hoops. Echoing Trentham’s trellis arcade of roses, and built to the same proportions, it is formed of weeping hornbeam, Carpinus betulus “Penula” sourced in Germany. The stone corridor and flowering meadow are revealed to be in segments, severed by four slim canals – a crisply-cut modern translation of Trentham’s elaborate terrace fountains. The grandeur of Trentham’s terraces “an expression” comments Tom, “of an Empire in its zenith” is reflected in the architectural features. At close quarters, and in this smaller setting, the impact of such monumental scale is greatly intensified.

The pointillist medley of flowering perennials, punctuated by broad-leaved clumps of Inula and Rodgersia, evokes a habitat of damp, sunny meadows. Such plants do well in the low-lying ground of Trentham, too, but would have been anathema to Charles Barry. Undeterred, Tom has been enjoying spreading his more free-spirited style of planting there, orchestrating waves of perennials in complementary colours and textures across the rigid Victorian framework of parterre beds. Linking these together are meandering lines of Miscanthus grasses, their course set by superimposing on the terrace an ordinance survey map of the River Trent and its tributaries, which the grasses trace.

Garden credits

Designer:
Tom Stuart-Smith

Sponsors:
Laurent-Perrier
Trentham