In this context, a Modernist design proved to be almost unrecognisable even as
a garden. “I remember the day a lot of TV companies came in,” Christopher
says. “A big influence on me was [architect] Tadao Ando and Japan, and the
Japanese company just walked straight past our garden while it was being
constructed. Everyone else was making gardens with tumbledown walls and
roses – and this TV crew literally thought my garden was the toilet block,”
he says with a laugh.
For Charles Moore, who commissioned Christopher, it was an opportunity to
create a garden that was “striking, bold and theatrical – I felt it would
have been a pity if the Telegraph had played safe with the
opportunity. I liked the thought of having something classical and modern at
the same time.
“I remember Terence Conran coming along to the garden,” he adds. “Tony Blair
had won the election a few weeks before [May 1 1997] and Terence Conran
said, ‘New Labour, New Garden’. Of course I wasn’t remotely interested in it
being New Labour, but I did want it to be different.”
Professionals were immediately aware that Christopher had done something
rather special. “It did mark a threshold in one respect, which was that
Christopher was a practising architect,” recalls Michael Balston, landscape
designer and seasoned RHS show-garden judge. “The manipulation of space was
very subtle and that hadn’t really been done before. It had this cleanness
about it. It was focused, yet there was a whole world there.
“It wasn’t a question of the facile ‘garden room’ idea. It was what we used to
call filtering – the creation of spaces beyond, which could be seen as
through a veil. And it was all integrated: the space, the materials and the
plants all locked together.”
Tom Stuart-Smith, who vies with Christopher as the most successful Chelsea
designer of recent times, says Christopher is one of the two contemporary
designers who have influenced him most (the other being Dan Pearson). “That
was a pointedly intellectual garden and it was so amazingly refreshing and
modern in the context of Chelsea at that time,” he says.
“Christopher made it smart to want a new-looking garden. And there was so much
going on in it – he has this curious reputation as a minimalist, but there
were so many little incidents and details.”
For Mary Keen, it was the way the planting was integrated with the overall
design that was most interesting. “He was always thinking of the whole
picture rather than the detail; the plants were put in at the end. He was
innovative with the planting – it was very spacey.”
Indeed, in the context of garden design at that time, when borders could be so
pumped up with plants they looked like they were on steroids, Christopher’s
“border” in the Latin Garden looked positively sparse. “I remember Simon
Hornby [then RHS president] coming along,” he recalls, “and he said, ‘We
love the spaces between the plants’. That wasn’t something I really thought
about. It seemed quite natural to me.”
There was also an element of innovation about the plant choice – the use of a
pared-down palette of striking plants, little colour variation and a
backdrop of grasses. In 1996, as part of his preparations for Chelsea,
Christopher made his first visit to Piet Oudolf’s now-celebrated nursery in
the Netherlands. They hit it off and talked plants, and Christopher returned
with various specimens including the unknown Thalictrum rochebrunianum he
would later use in the garden, causing a minor sensation, a plant which
is now firmly in the garden design repertoire.
Looking at images of the Latin Garden now, it’s hard to believe that it seemed
so radical just 16 years ago. But that’s a reflection of how influential it
proved to be. After 1997, modern gardens became a fixture on the Chelsea
scene. So far none has surpassed the original and best, but perhaps 2013,
Chelsea’s centenary, will be an auspicious year.
TELEGRAPH GARDEN 2013
The Telegraph garden for Chelsea 2013, designed by Christopher
Bradley-Hole, is a contemporary and contemplative design, inspired by the
English landscape, by the Japanese approach to garden making and by modern
abstract art.
Christopher says: “The garden is a representation of England as a wooded
landscape from which openings were cleared to allow settlement, civilisation
and cultivation. English native trees and shrubs are used in a graphic way
to create an understorey which expresses the way a field pattern has been
superimposed on the land.”
The garden reflects Bradley-Hole’s personal passion for the English landscape
and also his visit last year to Japan, which has long been an inspiration
for his design ideas.
As well as blocks of box, yew and beech, which form the field landscape, oak
is shown as a structure – a colonnade of columns crafted from English green
oak.
View
the 15 show gardens at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show
Watch
Christopher Bradley-Hole talk about his 1997 Telegraph garden
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