RHS Malvern Spring Show
9th May 2024
Receiving an unexpected free ticket today, I put on some sun lotion and headed to the Three Counties Showground just outside Great Malvern. There was much to see, too much for one day, so I concentrated on the show gardens and breaking for donuts and coffee and sometimes icecream. The eight medal-winning show gardens located at the heart of the Malvern Spring Festival are one of the most popular features with visitors. They showcase everything from award-winning planting ideas to the latest design trends. The RHS welcomes designers of all abilities and encourages creative freedom in garden design by giving an open brief. This means the gardens come in many shapes and forms and are based on different themes – classical, contemporary or conceptual.
As a taste of what is on show, here is a selection of photos I took including descriptor insets to the bottom right. The last two photos are of gardens not included in the show garden competition, for which go to https://www.rhsmalvern.co.uk/whats-on/gardens/show-gardens/
Bob Moore
AFTERWORD – Laskett Gardens
Back home and remembering the Laskett show garden, I decided to look up more information on Sir Roy Strong who with his wife designed the amazing Laskett Gardens not far away in Herefordshire, which I must visit one day. Have a look at https://perennial.org.uk/gardens/gardens-menu/the-laskett/
I also have found an interesting piece in the Guardian: here’s how it starts:
Sir Roy Strong discovered gardening at about the time he left the National Portrait Gallery for the directorship of the Victoria and Albert in 1973. What soon became an enduring passion was rapidly put to good use and combined with his already unrivalled expertise on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century court culture and early British painting. The immediate results were The Renaissance Garden, which appeared in 1979, and the chaotic exhibition, The Garden, which he put on at the V&A later the same year.
Since then, after a couple of TV series, some manuals on the design of small gardens and a biography which lists him as garden design consultant to Versace, Elton John and the Prince of Wales (now King Charles), Strong has sometimes seemed in danger of becoming the Charlie Dimmock of garden history. His sumptuously produced book, The Artist & the Garden, however, is a solid, academic work in which he returns to the roots of his scholarship.
Though focusing on paintings of gardens of the past, it is a misleading title for a book whose subject is, in effect, a history of garden design in Britain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Strong’s Renaissance Garden was dedicated ‘in memory of all those gardens destroyed by Capability Brown and his successors’.
from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/31/houseandgarden