PARIS (AP) — Spring signals new beginnings. Not only in statement-making prints and new colors — as the Paris spring-summer 2013 season has shown — but in bold ideas that remap the fashion landscape.

One such revamp came in the form of Raf Simons.

The anticipation around the Belgian’s ready-to-wear debut at Dior was palpable: Crowds spilled into the all-white edifice at the Hotel des Invalides and actor Robert de Niro, director Luc Besson and designer Diane Von Furstenberg lined the front row.

And the designer did not disappoint — evolving his own minimalist style with whimsical exuberance and also that of the iconic house, whose codes he mastered, then subverted.

Taking the trend of color spliced with summer black, his pale palette came in yellows, greens, pink and metallic blue.

Brighter hues were served up by Roland Mouret, the master of va-va-voom, and Anne Valerie Hash whose unified collections boasted vibrancy, yet, still, never strayed too far from the black, that’s now a mainstay for 2013.

Issey Miyake, meanwhile, picked back up of the popular trend of color-blocking to kaleidoscopic effect.

Saturday’s shows include dutch design duo Viktor Rolf and the fashion queen of England, Vivienne Westwood.

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CHRISTIAN DIOR

Freedom was at the heart of Raf Simons’ outing for Dior — a confident show that twinned the essence of the 1950’s “New Look,” with the liberated hemlines of the 1960s.

Simons — a minimalist — is in many ways the stark opposite of Christian Dior, the exuberant house founder who favored longer ankle-length silhouettes.

But Friday’s free, liberating display shows that in spirit — if not perhaps in silhouette — they meet eye to eye.

Simons took the “New Look” bar jacket, in black, gray and white and sent it down the catwalk often bare-legged, with the hemlines of the sexual revolution.

It was the same rebellious mood with which Christian Dior founded the house in 1947: His long-length “New Look” shocked the fashion world in its indulgent use of material — a backlash against wartime fabric rationing.

“The foundation of the house is a reaction to restrictions,” said Simons. “I wanted to do that too.”

Do it, he did — not forgetting to have fun on the way.

Cheekily, Simons turned it and other jackets into mini dresses — twinned with black uber-short shorts. Other looks had a dash of Simons’ own signature architecture.

Simons’ has been swatting up.

Where Christian Dior loved garden flowers — here, Raf Simons delved even further into the bushes, bringing back in his jam-jar six sumptuous insect-inspired looks in silk and tulle.

One pink and blue loose A-line used tulle and embroidery to create the translucent veins of an insect wing.

It was details like this that made this collection fly so freely and so high.

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ISSEY MIYAKE

Issey Miyake’s collection was born, so say the program notes, of “vibrantly colored images of birds alighting…and flapping their wings.”

Weaving in the house’s signature high-tech fabric on sheer and tulle jersey, the result: A color-blocked phoenix of a show.

Hues — and also models, who walked in criss-cross formation — converged and flowed. In the process, it added a much-welcome splash of fun to the Paris Fashion Week calendar.

Black graphic stripes blurred in the loose and pleat-rich silhouettes, in lime yellow, cobalt, sky blue and orange, only serving to add to these visual illusions.

Then came the science: The Miyake fabric-lab showing that it’s been as busy as ever.

This season they served up what the house calls “revolutionary” double-sided printing. Revolutionary it wasn’t, but images on the front and back blurred together to produce a nice graphic play.

Models strolled down the catwalk haphazardly in white open-toe sandals.

“Forget spring,” they seemed to say, “we can’t wait for summer.”

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ROLAND MOURET

There must be a lot of pressure on Roland Mouret to break away from the label of the one-dress wonder.

The inventor of the famed cap-sleeved “Galaxy dress,” that’s graced a million red carpets, has, perhaps consciously, been in an experimental mood recently, gently modifying his signature mold. This continues in Friday’s coherent show.

Where last season the silhouettes were likened to an abbreviated 1950s “New Look,” Friday’s show had tinges of 1980s space-age geometry.

Origami-like folds on belts, straps and sporadically attached large pockets provided a small creative twist on a more structured, fitted collection.

Peplums and geometric filets, and one-off pleats provided the creative butter, spread on his bread-winning va va voom silhouettes.

They made a comeback as pencil skirts and sheaths this season in deep green, white and on-trend vermillion.

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ANNE VALERIE HASH

Anne Valerie Hash hit the right spot with her feminine but edgy show, featuring several looks with the top part sliced completely off.

“It was about female self-confidence,” said Hash backstage. And the guillotine effect, too?

“Ah, I suppose I also wanted to have some fun.”

The guillotined materials’ were suspended to the body thanks to a bustier, which gave the shoulders a curious and imaginative trompe l’oeil effect.

High waists and pencil-skirts in many of the 33 ensembles — in indulgent lashings of summer black, power pinks, coral, gold and “electric anise” — gave a structure and confidence to the often super skinny models’ fragile silhouettes.

But Hash — a woman’s woman — didn’t forget the sex appeal too: With stretch chiffon, second skin sequins, stretch leather and satin, many of the looks dripped liquid sensuality.

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Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

About to represent Britain in the prestigious Gardening World Cup – which takes place in Japan this month – Wisbech garden designer Richard Miers tells Alice Ryan about his life, work and enduring love of Mother Nature

Richard Miers is clearly a man with a tidy mind. Look at any one of his acclaimed garden designs – which range from compact and bijou town plots to sweeping country estates – and you’ll see evidence of a creator keen on keeping order. Each has a pleasing geometry, defined by clean lines of hedging, paths, walls, espaliered fruit trees or even water, which are then gently blurred by the softest of planting.

“An old school friend maintains there’s an ecclesiastical influence,” laughs Richard. “He says walking into one of my gardens is like stepping inside a cathedral, complete with an aisle and an altar; I do like to have a focal point in my designs, I must admit. . .” The analogy certainly has its merits. Along with their architectural qualities, Richard’s gardens appear both quiet and calming: you imagine feeling cosseted by the velvety hedging, soothed by the sound of trickling water, and inspired by the ethereal plants. Named one of the country’s top 10 up-and-coming designers by House Garden magazine last year, he’s an undisputed master of his art.

Sitting in the kitchen of his Wisbech home – a glorious Georgian townhouse, which has a Grade II* listing – Richard is finalising plans for his latest project: Britain’s entry in the 2012 Gardening World Cup.

Taking place in Japan at the end of this month, the event is now in its third year and attracts entries from as far afield as New Zealand, North America, Europe and the Far East. Funded by a private benefactor, the competition takes place at Huis Tan Bosch, a sprawling Dutch theme park.

Each designer – 12 working on large gardens, like Richard, and a further 15 compiling smaller plots – will spend two weeks onsite overseeing construction. But everything else, including sourcing plants, has been done remotely.

“I got an email while we were on holiday in Greece which contained a photo of a tree, growing somewhere out in the countryside, with the question ‘Shall we dig this up for you?’,” says Richard. “The whole thing has been quite an experience.” In the past, Britain has been represented by Andy Sturgeon of Gardeners’ World fame, who has no less than five Chelsea Golds to his name; it is, admits Richard, ‘quite something’ to be selected for the job.

Inspired by Huis Tan Bosch’s close proximity to Nagasaki, the World Cup has been given the theme of ‘world peace’ by organiser Kazuyuki Ishihara (Japan’s answer to Monty Don).

Leafing through sketches, Richard explains his garden, titled ‘Serenity’, takes inspiration from the Olympic rings – being emblems of international accord – with a series of circular beds built into the design. In the centre of the plot, dappled with shade from mature trees, sits a table and chairs: “It calls us to sit down and talk, which is the start of any peace process.” A rill of water runs right round the perimeter of the garden, flowing smoothly and turbulently by turns; this reflects ‘the ups and downs in the journey of peace’.

At the end of the garden, a huge orb of polished stone shines brightly: the handiwork of British sculptor Emily Young, called Solar Disc III, it suggests ‘the rising of the sun, and the promise that a new day brings’.

Although this is a showpiece, it’s a remarkably liveable design; it’s not hard to imagine sitting in the shade of the trees, enjoying an early-evening glass of wine.

“I design real gardens, even when they are for a show,” agrees Richard. “In my mind, this is a town garden; we’re looking at it from the kitchen window.” Richard has loved gardening since he was a small boy. “My father was in the Army so we moved an awful lot: by the time I was my daughters’ age – Matilda and Venetia are 8 and 7 – I had lived in seven different houses. Whenever anyone asks me where I come from, I say ‘No fixed abode’.

“So I didn’t really have chance to garden until I was at prep school; I would have been 8. The headmaster’s wife ran a gardening club and, if you wanted, you could have a patch – about 4ft by 8ft – to call your own.

“I can still remember the satisfaction of carrying my own lettuce into supper, so I could have a lettuce and Marmite sandwich, instead of just Marmite. And coming back after the summer holidays – to find a crop of carrots – was just brilliant.” With his love of gardening gaining pace throughout his school years, it would have been a logical next step for Richard to do a degree in landscape architecture. But he decided to start work instead – and ended up spending several years as a leisure club manager.

“To start with, you think you’re helping people get fit and feel healthier. Gradually I realised that, aside from a hardcore of members, most people joined the gym, came along for a few weeks and then gave up.

“Eventually I thought ‘The hours are anti-social, the pay is rubbish, and I’m not really helping anyone. What on earth am I doing this for?’. . . I also wanted to get back in touch with nature and the seasons. And I wanted to do something real: there’s genuine satisfaction in seeing a garden – a design which started life in your imagination – coming to fruition.” Deciding to take a design course, Richard divided his time between studying and doing garden maintenance jobs. A dog lover (he currently has two terriers, the elderly Tilly and Coco, a pup), Richard’s big break came courtesy of his then-canine companion, a lurcher rescued from Battersea. “Having a dog in London is a very sociable thing. You find yourself talking to complete strangers; you don’t even know their name, but you know all about their dog. . . I got talking to this chap and next thing I knew I was being interviewed for a job.” Richard went on to spend seven years as right-hand-man to the esteemed Arne Maynard, the man behind this year’s Laurent-Perrier garden at Chelsea, before deciding to strike out on his own, launching Richard Miers Garden Design.

Moving out of London to raise their family, he and his wife settled in Wisbech several years ago and clearly have a huge affection for East Anglia; if they were to move anywhere, says Richard, it would only be over the border to Norfolk. Recent commissions include everything from the 15-acre garden of a new-build Palladian mansion in Surrey to tiny central London courtyards. Most work comes via word of mouth.

“A successful garden doesn’t have to be big: it’s not about scale, it’s about getting the right proportions. And it’s not about trying to cram everything in. For me, a garden shouldn’t shout: it should be restful, a peaceful backdrop to whatever you’re doing, whether it’s entertaining guests or just sitting quietly.” A great believer in gardens being an extension of the house they belong to, Richard likes his designs to be in keeping with the period of the property: “I wouldn’t slavishly recreate a Victorian garden for a Victorian house, but I would bear the history of the place in mind.” All Richard’s designs begin with a sketch, which he fleshes out on the computer – to show both aerial plans and 3D projections. “Sometimes I can see it immediately, other times I wake up in the middle of the night and think ‘That’s it!’ and have to get up and scribble it down.” Along with strong structure, Richard’s gardens boast almost fairytale planting schemes; a favourite palette is pink, white and purple, incorporating both cottage garden classics and more contemporary favourites.

Among his mainstays are Rosa rugosa ‘Roseraie de la Hay’ for heady scent, Geranium ‘Roxanne’ for plentiful blooms, Schizostylis coccinea ‘Fenland Daybreak’ for spirit-lifting colour and the swishy grass Pennisetum ‘Fairy Tails’ for both height and elegance.

“I even read gardening magazines to relax. I think it was Steve Jobs who said ‘If you really love doing something, you’ll do it much better than the next guy’ and I think that’s true. Designing gardens is more than just my job – it’s more like a way of life.”

Disclaimer

Activities are not organised by the BBC unless stated otherwise. Neither is the BBC responsible for the accuracy of the information provided. If you are under 18, ask your parent/guardian before taking part in any activity.

Submitted by Volunteer McKinney

Volunteer McKinney offers several opportunities this week.

• Butterfly Garden Design. Vega Elementary has the perfect place to build a butterfly garden but needs a landscape architect to help with its design. To volunteer for this one-time opportunity, go to www.mckinneyisd.net/parents/volunteer/ or look for “Landscape Design . . .” on the Volunteer Opportunities page of the Volunteer McKinney web site.

• Advocate for Hispanic Victims of Impaired Driving. Bilingual volunteers are needed to develop educational programs to advocate for Hispanic victims of impaired driving. These volunteers might speak to community groups about preventing underage drinking or attend court with victims of impaired driving. Orientation and training is provided free of charge. Select How to Volunteer, then click on the link to volunteer
opportunities. Then select More Updated Listings and look for “Hispanic Court and Victim Advocate.”

• Gala Fundraiser. The Chrysalis Gala, scheduled for October 20, 2012, is the biggest fundraiser of the year for Boys and Girls Clubs of Collin County. Thirty volunteers are needed the morning of the event to help set up for the evening auction. Shifts are 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. Volunteers will help display and stage auction items. During the event, a volunteer photographer’s assistant is needed to collect
the correct spelling of guests’ names as their photographs are taken. For either of these opportunities, click on “More New Listings” and scroll to Chrysalis Gala.

For more volunteer opportunities go to our website at volunteermckinney.org or contact our office at volunteer@volunteermckinney.org or phone us at 972-542-0679.

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The Kelly Bulmer Sensory Garden opened at Oakham CE Primary School. Kelly, who died aged 17 in a car accident in August, 2010, attended the school before joining Catmose College.

Kelly designed a garden while she was in Year 5 at the primary school and a garden has now been created in her memory is based on her design.

Kelly’s mother Pat, who works at the school as a teaching assistant, and father Keith were also at the opening.

Mrs Bulmer said: “I think it is just lovely that there is a permanent memorial of Kelly. She loved being at the school and part of her is still here.

“It makes it all the more special that it’s Kelly’s design and it is lovely how her drawings have been interpreted.”

Mrs Bulmer said it was it was only by good fortune that Kelly’s design survived a clearout of the school, before it was demolished and rebuilt.

She said: “Very few of the children remember Kelly but they remember the accident and they know I was Kelly’s mum so I think it will be a very special place for them.”

Mrs Bulmer had some input into the garden and specifically asked for purple flowers to be included as purple was her daughter’s favourite colour.

The garden has a quiet seating area with a water feature and is surrounded by flowers and a gravelled area. There are also vegetable beds for the children to plant and sculptures of birds hanging from the trees.

Mrs Bulmer said she was “overwhelmed” and “speechless” when she saw the completed garden.

Mr Bulmer added: “I haven’t seen it before and I don’t know what I was expecting but it is absolutely lovely. It was an emotional day.”

Headteacher Joan Gibson said Kelly had drawn a beautiful picture for the original sensory garden and it had been incorporated into the garden.

“But there is more than the shape of Kelly’s design here,” she said. “The garden is saying something about her, about how beautiful she was, her generosity and her kind spirit.

“It will help us to remember her and everyone we have lost. It is a very special place.”

The garden was opened by Canon Lee Francis-Dehqani, who read two poems in memory of Kelly.

The garden was funded by the Rotary Club of Rutland, after the club president Malcolm Mann, a friend of the Bulmer family, suggested contributing.

Mr Mann said: “It is a memorial to Kelly but it is also a place for the children to learn about growing plants and vegetables and it is something that is going to keep changing, which is nice to think of.”

The Oakham in Bloom committee also helped with planting and the garden was built during the summer holidays by Craig Piggot, whose wife Sarah is a teacher at the school. Palmers of Oakham also provided materials.

It will be maintained by the school’s gardening club and Mr and Mrs Bulmer also hope to add their own touch with flower-shaped seats, assisted by the parent teacher association.

Kathleen Hildebrand has always loved interior design. As a child, her friends were playing with Barbies, while Hildebrand was redecorating Barbie’s house with whatever accessories she could find.

Hildebrand believes that using her imagination and creativity at such a young age is what made her the resourceful, think-outside-the-box designer she is today.

Previously an interior designer in Massachusetts, Hildebrand moved to Washington state almost a decade ago, and last year picked up her paintbrush and measuring tape again to help area residents make their homes and offices beautiful.

Owner of Lily-Max Designs in Blaine, Hildebrand embraces a simple design philosophy – use what you have if you can, and turn it into something unrecognizably fabulous.

She also believes that it is just as important to have space that is purposeful and organized as it is aesthetically pleasing.

Hildebrand’s favorite part of the design process is the “after.” She enjoys the process of creating a space, but loves to see the client’s reaction to the finished product, especially since they often don’t know how to achieve what they want on their own.

“That’s what an interior designer is for, to help you make your space work best for you,” Hildebrand said. “I want people’s homes to be their refuge.”

Contrary to popular belief, interior design is not just for the wealthy. Hildebrand takes pride in being extremely budget-conscious, often reusing or repurposing existing materials. She recently redid a bathroom for $230 by making thoughtful choices and using what her clients already had.

If you are ready for a change, Hildebrand says there are two key things that will quickly make a difference in your space. “If you only have the resources to do one or two things, organize and paint,” she said. “Getting rid of clutter immediately improves the look and function of a space. Give everything its own place, and make sure it stays there.”

“Secondly, don’t underestimate the transformative powers of a fresh coat of paint,” she said. “It’s simple to do, reasonably priced, and can make a drastic change in the look of a room.”

Hildebrand also recommends that your big pieces of furniture be neutral in color, as this allows you to change up your accessories according to season or your mood. She also firmly believes that spending a little extra time hunting a yard sale or making something yourself is worth the effort. “Your home should have things that are special to you,” she said.

For more information on Lily-Max Designs, visit lilymax.com or call 800/398-0610.

Last spring, Paige Wolf embraced the growing season with a green thumb and good intentions. After years of container gardening, she decided that it was time to tend a plot in her backyard, living out the urban idyll that, with increasing peer pressure, has practically become a lifestyle requirement.

Wolf, a 33-year-old who runs a public-relations company in Philadelphia, created a backyard garden measuring about five feet by four feet. She planted tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, dill, oregano, parsley and mint.

“Two tomatoes came really early in the season and then never again. Every now and then, I would get a bean and it would immediately shrivel up and die,” Wolf says. As for the dill, oregano and parsley, she says, “none of that ever came out of the ground.”

Committed to gardening without pesticides, Wolf also had to deal with the challenges that come with that route. “I know that successful organic gardening is very possible. However, in my case, slugs ate everything,” she says. Except, of course, the mint, which “just sprawled throughout the garden.”

By early September, Wolf took to her blog to, as she wrote, “admit to myself and the world that my garden is a failure.” And what a failure, at least in her telling. From that same blog post: “It is currently a dank, dark mosquito and slug lair with arbitrary vines tangled about. I am a little bit scared of it and when people offer me a few of their organically gardened fruits, I cry.”

The charms of gardening have always tugged at the imagination, but it now carries with it a cultural cachet as never before. Homesteading, slow food, eco-friendliness and locavore living – identity choices as much as they are lifestyle ones – all dovetail in gardening. Besides, it’s hard to watch chef Jamie Oliver on television strolling through his perfectly kept garden, snipping dinner off the vine, and not wonder how great life would be if you had that.

The problem is not all the reasons that make gardening so appealing. The problem is that so many of us fail to recognize just how much work it takes to get it right before we invest our money and time.

“Everybody wants a garden, but nobody wants to garden,” says Ellen Novack, co-author of Gardening from a Hammock.

So it’s no surprise that so many people’s big plans in the spring – not to mention big purchases at garden centres – become massive failures by the end of the summer. Gardening can begin with great expectations, which, like an overgrown plant, often need to be scaled back.

“People who don’t have the time or the energy, they’ll start enthusiastically and then life gets in the way,” Novack says.

Sheree Rasmussen is the co-owner of Inside and Out Garden Design, in Toronto. Many of her younger clients – most of them couples with young children living in their first home – practically feel obliged to have a vegetable patch even if they do not have the time to tend it.

“A lot of them have almost like a guilt thing, like they feel like they should have a little section to grow their own veggies,” she says. “Many of our clients want that incorporated and then they just can’t do it.”

To those whose available time or skills do not match their ambitions, gardening experts advise dealing with epic fails by simply scaling back next spring. Helen Battersby, a garden coach in Toronto, suggests starting with a plot of land no bigger than two feet by two feet. “And then maybe next year you make it not four by four, but two and a half by two and a half,” she says. Too often, people overextend themselves and soon find they do not have the time for the necessary upkeep. Build slowly.

Perhaps most important, do not take failures too seriously. Even experienced gardeners make their share of mistakes each year. “It’s not just new gardeners who don’t always realize everything they hoped for in the spring,” says Steven Biggs, a garden writer in Toronto. “Don’t be a total perfectionist.”

As for Wolf, she is not going to give up the dream of successful vegetable gardening.

Seeing all her friends post their own success stories on Facebook is driving her kind of crazy right now, she says, but there is always next year. And as an author – she has already written a book on raising children in what she calls the age of “environmental guilt”– she says she may have found the subject for her next book: “homesteading for dummies.”

Too much power

We all know the importance of weeding and watering, but Janice Miller-Young, a Calgary gardening coach, says it’s just as important to think about your soil as it is to think about what you are planting.

She recently visited a couple who had complete crop failure this year. “It turned out they were rototilling their soil every spring,” she says. That can damage the soil’s structure and destroy beneficial organisms. “If you’re starting a new garden, you might want to rototill once at the beginning, but that’s it. The guy, of course, was very disappointed he couldn’t use the power tool any more in the spring.”

If you do want to loosen up your soil next spring, try turning it over in large clumps with a gardening fork, Miller-Young suggests.

Photo Courtesy Of Jessy Berg

This espaliered pear tree sits in a narrow strip as a separation between the garden and the driveway.

As a landscape designer, I like my garden to be in harmony – with the different elements working together. So, unless I have a secluded area for raised beds, I tend to find utilitarian rows of veggies quite the eyesore.

But integrating edibles into the design itself – and making them an attractive part of the overall landscape – easily solves this problem.

The following edibles look great as part of the overall garden design.

• Herbs. One of my favorite herbs to plant is chives. Perfect little grasses, they work in all types of gardens, including formal, cottage and contemporary. Their lavender flowers also work beautifully in a pastel color palette. Mix chives with other tasty spices like oregano, thyme and rosemary. Throw a miniature rose bush in the middle for a design that’s beautiful and edible, too.

I recommend placing herbs near the kitchen for easy access. As you select them for cooking, you will keep them pruned and tidy along the way.

• Trees. Fruit and citrus trees such as lemons, apples, plums and apricots are very flexible in an edible garden design. They achieve the height that many gardens need to create a sense of privacy while simultaneously providing shade and food. Plant a persimmon tree and you will have a tall shade tree with amazing fall colors, followed by the beautiful orange fruit.

If you have a path, plant rows of fruit trees on either side to create an allée, which works equally well in Mediterranean, formal and cottage gardens.

When planting lemons, I often use two different kinds: the Improved Meyer Lemon, which is sweet and works well for cocktails, and the Eureka Lemon, which is tarter and, in my opinion, better for fish and lemonade.

I’m also a big fan of espaliered and trellised trees, especially in small garden spaces. They look great in formal and modern gardens.

• Hedges and shrubs. Blueberry bushes are my favorite edible hedges. There is also Carissa macrocarpa, which grows small natal plums and can be pruned to look like a hedge. In fact, it can withstand quite a bit of shearing to work in a formal or contemporary garden.

• Groundcover. Strawberries make an excellent low planting, and some stay green most of the year. I recommend planting multiple varieties so that you have a longer crop season, and some variety in taste. I often use everbearers or day-neutral (a general class of strawberries), because they tend to flower and bear fruit year-round.

• Vines. Overhead and climbing plants are plentiful in the edible garden. Grapes are a standard in any edible garden, but don’t forget the others – kiwi and passionflower have attractive flowers and produce delicious fruit. When it comes to the passionflower vine, make sure you get the fruiting kind. And with kiwi vines, unless you want two, get Actinidia arguta Issai because it’s self-pollinating. Other kiwis need a male for the female to fruit.

The bottom line. The next time you go to the nursery, why not pick up some plants that serve double duty? They’ll look great as part of your overall garden design and produce food to boot.

Jessy Berg is a professional landscape designer and co-founder of Habitat Design, which offers full-service online landscape design planning for small and mid-sized gardens and an online store of unique garden and home furnishings. For more information, visit habitatdesign.com.

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APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the VA, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

Walnut Hill Garden Club of Hanover will host a lecture and slide show titled “Gardening for the 21st Century” by Marie Stella, landscape historian and landscape designer, at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at Phoenix Lodge, Broadway and Washington streets, Hanover.

The lecture is free and the public is invited.

Stella holds graduate certificates in landscape design and landscape design history from Radcliffe College, Harvard University. In 2009, Stella’s home, Beaver Lodge in Shelburne Falls, which she designed and built for sustainability, was the first single family home certified to have earned a Platinum level “green” level, the highest rating possible from the U.S. Green Building Council LEED/E for Homes. The Center for Ecological Technology, a nonprofit organization offering green building services across western Massachusetts, certified the home. It was the sixth home in Massachusetts that had earned the LEED Platinum rating.

In her Hanover lecture, Stella will discuss how a sustainable landscape can address present resident needs without adversely impacting the ability of future residents to meet new and changing needs. Addressing environmental awareness, Stella will highlight ways to use plant material to clean air, soil and water and to restore the ecological systems.

Topics will include dry gardening, plant buffer zones, the lawn and invasive species. New directions in water management concentrate on the permeable ground plane, mulches and natural swimming pools without chemicals. Heirloom and unusual varieties of herbs, vegetables, fruits and flowers bind people to their past; Stella will discuss why it is important to preserve the full range of genetic possibilities of such plants for the future.

To reserve a place or for more information, call 671-826-6329 or email: walnuthillma@hotmail.com.