Royal Horticultural Society
The Royal Horticultural Show, Chelsea Flower Show 2022 – Gold awarded garden in association with Ruth Willmott Associates and Morris & Co
This is our second partnership with Ruth Willmott & Associates and our first with Morris & Co. and the Arc Centre, Islington.
Sixty7.green has formally joined Ruth Willmott Associates as its in-house sustainability advisor and was delighted to be involved in the Chelsea Flower Show project once again, but this time from the get-go. The brief was to ensure sustainability was at the heart of the project which included identifying and then brokering a relationship with a relocation partner and local community.
What we did
Sixty7.green joined the design team as sustainability advisor. We examined aspects such as water efficient design, extreme-weather-tolerant plant species, local sourcing, and low embodied carbon material use. We examined the climate change issues likely to impact gardens in the south east of England. We also identified and brokered a relationship with a relocation partner - the Arc Centre – a not for profit community organisation providing support to residents on the recently regenerated Packington Estate in Islington, North London.
The result was the gold awarded Morris & Co. Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2022.
Morris & Co. noted in an article about the 19th century textile designer, poet and social activist William Morris, that ‘Nature provided the language to express his (William Morris’s) political and creative ideals. Morris, ever sensitive to the impact of mankind on the natural world, records its beauty throughout his considerable design catalogue, encouraging us to look, and look again, at the natural world with an almost sacred awe’.
William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1887
“If the earth nourish us all alike, if the sun shines for all of us alike, if to one and all of us the glorious drama of the earth - day and night, summer and winter - can be presented as a thing to understand and love...” William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, 1885
That passion for nature resonates so strongly with Sixty7.green, that it seems a match made in heaven for the team and the more we learned about Morris, the more our worlds seemed to align.
Morris was not only deeply drawn to nature, the beauty of its symmetry, but he was also a staunch campaigned for social justice. The more we learned about him, the more excited we became about this project. Then, a further discovery seemed almost too good to believe – a definite a-ha moment, the stars aligned, and we knew we were on a winner.
Core to the design was water providing habitat for birds, bees and bugs, plants that suggested a bit of wildness or naughtiness, beauty in the untamed. The design also celebrated the use of natural materials such as clay tiles and Yorkshire stone. It brought together tree species familiar across the English landscape such as Hawthorne (Crataegus) and Willows (Salix). Other plant species were carefully selected not only to attract birds, bees and bugs but also to reflect the species that so inspired many of Morris’s wallpaper designs.
In total nearly 4000 plants made up the garden which was classically beautiful and reminiscent of the English countryside.
But Sixty7.green’s greatest and proudest achievement was leading on the partnership with the Arc Centre and garden relocation to the Packington estate which by happenstance, happened to be a stone’s throw away from the very place that William Morris first printed the wallpaper designs that serendipitously were already being used by Ruth Willmott Associates to inspire the garden design itself – Trellis and Willow Boughs. These patterns, we were told, celebrated nature’s mysteries, the designs’ stories, histories, palettes, and patterns of the garden that was created. The stars couldn’t have been more aligned, right?
To top this project off, the legacy is the involvement of more than 200 volunteers, the formation of 5 gardening angel groups, the creation of new skills for local residents, the emergence of community engagement projects, development of new friendships and supporter networks, initiation of a new community food growing project, design of a new apiary (bee) project, and the likely inspiration of future horticulturalists and garden designers.