May is Chelsea time. The Chelsea Flower Show is the most prestigious garden event in the world. It is where we landscape designers can be artists building our own dream gardens, not our clients‘. This year because of the pandemic, the show is cancelled, a virtual programme is being planned.
In this series I want to celebrate five garden designers and their award-winning gardens leading up to the flower show. The five I chose have influenced me and my development in one way or another. I hope you‘ll find their very different styles as inspiring as I do.
I am beginning my list with the landscape designer I was closest to though we never met. John Brookes MBE won three gold medals in a row at Chelsea (and several more), and is known as “the man who made the modern garden”. He introduced the concept of the “room outside” to landscape design, while specialising in small urban gardens early in his career and noticing that people liked to use their outdoor spaces for eating and entertaining, not just for collecting flowers.
When Brookes was chosen to design a garden for Chelsea in 1962, he was the first independent designer to build an exhibition garden at a show that was dominated by floral nursery displays. This was groundbreaking in itself, but his design certainly broke the mould. The garden was shown in relation to the house, displayed a combination of form and function, had “ugly” practical elements such as room for an incinerator. It was visionary but perhaps a little too much so. The judges awarded Brookes a timid silver medal.
John Brookes based his designs on patterns and proportions. He used a grid system derived from measurements of the house, and applied it to interlocking, overlapping patterns on paper. As a result, his 1962 Chelsea design plan looks like a modernist painting. Doesn’t it remind you of a Mondrian?
I learned this technique from him in an online class I took before I even started my formal design education. Brookes wasn’t a household name then unlike other Chelsea winners, so I had the incredible good fortune to be the only student in his class! And so, this amazing one-on-one tutorial resulted in my first ever garden being co-designed by John Brookes MBE.
Further reading:
https://garden-design-courses.co.uk/john-brookes/
https://www.ft.com/content/5a39f558-372f-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c544
