Q&A with the award winning garden designer
To mark what would have been Members’ Day at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2021, Matthew Fleming interviews three-time gold medal winning garden designer, Marcus Barnett. Giving some golden behind-the-scenes insights into the iconic flower show, Marcus talks about what inspires him and what it takes to create an award winning space.
Your design inspiration is the ‘handrail’ to which you return when you are lost. My 2015 ‘Telegraph Garden’ was inspired by the De Stijil art movement of the 1920s. The design was influenced by the use of rectangles and primary colours in Theo van Doesburg’s ‘Rhythm of a Russian Dance’ combined with my love of the English countryside. These images were invaluable as the team were able to refer back to them to ensure that what we were doing remained in the best interests of the project.
Planning and preparation for the Chelsea Flower Show is a complex military-style operation. The structural engineering, logistics, and level of detail behind the show is immense. Quite apart from anything else, constructing your garden in three weeks is a huge undertaking. We have to be able to ‘control’ nature, as you cannot have plant failure on the day. This requires back-up plants as well as artificial heating and cooling environments to ensure the plants are at the right stage.
Designing for the Chelsea Flower Show is so rewarding. There is nothing better than seeing wet mud transforming into a garden. The process is not only a privilege and a joy, but also a great challenge requiring innovation and imagination. Although it’s a competition the atmosphere is never hostile. The focus is on delivering your garden successfully through an enormously collaborative process.
Entries are judged against their own brief. The designers decide everything, including who the garden is for, the location, the height, the colour palette. The judges then analyse how closely the designers deliver on that brief, whether the garden is new or a variation on a previous design, is daring or unimaginative and features plants of a good quality. It is a thorough and intense process.
A ‘Marcus Barnett’ garden is recognisable by its ‘ordered disorder’. They range from the size of a car to hundreds of hectares square but they will have some things in common. There will often be a rectilinear layout with very generous spaces softened with an abundance of plants and grasses.
For the first time ever, the Chelsea Flower Show will be held in September this year. Click here to watch our video: ‘Behind the scenes of Chelsea Flower Show’ with Marcus Barnett.