A hopeful and joyful future is envisioned through the planting of natural areas in a garden inspired by a rejuvinated quarry landscape filled with bright sedums and Welsh poppies in this garden for the Terrence Higgins Trust. Wales is at the heart of this garden too: granite boulders like those found in the slate landscape of North Wales are dotted throughout the foliage, and a striking monolith slate stepping stone sits at the garden’s heart.
Q: Matthew, this is a beautiful garden design, and a very moving one too because it honours all the lives lost to HIV. But it’s also a hopeful vision of the Terrence Higgins Trust’s prediction that by 2030 we will have no new HIV cases. So how did the journey of this garden evolve?
Matthew: I designed my first Chelsea garden exactly ten years ago for RBC Brewin Dolphin, just four years after I’d graduated as a new designer. My first little show garden was in 2012 at Hampton Court. It went really well, and I acquired sponsorship the following year to do a garden for Ecover. I then found myself on Main Avenue the following year with RBC Brewin Dolphin. With hindsight, ten years on, I think it was a brilliant opportunity and I had to go for it, but it was still very early on in my career. I got a Silver Gilt for it, but it was very obvious that I’d tried to show the judges everything I could do in one garden all at once.
After that, I decided everything was moving so quickly that I needed to take a step back and focus on my career and designing real gardens – developing the experience I needed. Eventually I went back to doing some gardens at Hampton Court, but I really wanted to go back to Chelsea again. I actually had the idea for this garden ten years ago: I really wanted to do something for a cause I felt passionate about.
As a gay man who grew up in the 1980s, I was so aware of everything surrounding HIV and AIDS and the fear factor of it all. I was so scared that I think I distanced myself from the whole thing. It’s only recently, having seen how people all came together during the COVID-19 pandemic without stigma, that it resonated with me again.
Even though we’ve come a long way, HIV still exists and there’s still a hell of a lot of stigma and myth surrounding it, which dates back to the 1980s and the idea that it only affected certain groups of people. I decided that the idea for a garden I’d had ten years ago was something I wanted to make happen.” The Project Giving Back opportunity was there and I pitched for it, and our garden was one of the the 14 that they’re supporting at the show. It’s phenomenal, and I’m just so excited that the Terrence Higgins Trust has a mainstream platform to talk about sexual health. We should talk about it in the same way we do any other form of health.
Q: You��’ve threaded so many touching themes throughout the fabric of the garden. Can you talk us through some of the highlights?
Matthew: So the starting point was obviously that 1980s televised public health campaign, which was set in an explosive dark slate quarry. The word ‘AIDS’ was chiselled onto a tombstone and it fell over… lilies were thrown onto it, and everybody was going to die. Fear and death. If you look at where HIV is now, and where charities like the Terrence Higgins Trust are now, we’re so far from that point: if people who are diagnosed with HIV now are put on the correct medication, they can live long, healthy lives, they won’t pass it on to others, and there is this possibility that if people continue to get tested and are on the right medication we should be able to eradicate HIV in the UK by 2030. That’s a much more positive story, but I don’t think most people know all the facts around where we are with HIV now. I wanted the starting point to be the quarry, but I wanted a garden that was inspired by a rejuvenated quarry.
I’m from Wales originally and spent most of my childhood holidays in North Wales, and Terence Higgins himself was actually from Wales. I just thought what a wonderful thing it is to break down stereotypes. HIV is often thought of as an urban kind of condition, or something that affects only certain groups of people. And we know, actually, it can affect anyone, anywhere in any country.
I looked at some defunct slate quarries where the bottoms of the quarries are now flooded and where plants have very slowly started to colonise these hard landscapes. It’s amazing how resilient plants can be and how they will try their very best to grow in very limited amounts of soil with very limited amounts of water. You get mosses that start to come in and little bits of heather, and you get little birch saplings… they might be a bit twisted because they’ve had to really struggle to grow, and I thought that was a brilliant analogy for the resilience behind the journey of achieving that 2030 vision.
From a horticultural perspective, we know we’re all now struggling with climate change. We need to think very differently about how we plant and how we think about gardening. I also thought it was a beautiful story to bring in this whole idea of resilient plants.
We’ve used a crevice style of planting at the front of the quarry: it’s a style of planting that was (and still is) very popular in what is now the Czech Republic, back in the 1970s. It made its way over here, and it’s also popular in different states in America now as well. It’s the idea of laying stone on its side to create a natural-looking landscape. It’s much more about the rock than a normal rock garden is, and you have probably about 50 per cent rock to planting. As a result, you have these very small crevices where plants have to push their roots down deep to find the soil, which means that they grow tougher and stronger.
There’s a lot more moisture at that level, so plants aren’t exposed to the seasonal variations they’d normally experience. Plants can access the moisture throughout the year and water is also channelled down into those crevices, so it’s a really resilient form of planting. This idea of xeriscaping, which is gardening with limited or reduced amounts of irrigation, is something we’re very excited to show.
Then, as you go further up into the garden, it becomes more naturalistic and there are more trees. It becomes more shady and allows for a more lush, native woodland planting.
A big symbolic feature at the front of the garden is the tiered pond, which is reminiscent of the base of a quarry. The water in it will rise and fall ever so slightly and stepping stones will be added, but at some points there’ll be no crossing. At other points, there will be this monolithic stone, harking back to the 1980s campaign that symbolised stigma and fear, but this stone acts as a bridge into the garden – into the 2030 vision.
As you go through the garden, you pass a big boulder that looks as though it’s fallen and is held up by all these little sticks. These sticks are reminiscent of the journey so far, the number of people who have been victims of HIV, the people who have been involved in researching it, the scientists and all the people that have been involved in developing new medications – all the people really who have championed the cause and worked to break down stigma.
Source: theenglishgarden.co.uk
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