Research Garden DesignBrowse photos, get design ideas & see the hottest plants
The Olympics are n’t the only ace cause a heralded return to London this summer . Garden designerSarah Pricemade a invitingly brief printing at theRHS Chelsea Flower Showwith two beautiful gardens in 2007 and 2008 but has kept a gloomy profile in the retiring four years . Now , as one of the principle designers working under master copy planner George Hargreaves , Price , 31 , is helping to transform an unpromising waterside strip of industrial wasteland into the big new urban park work up in the U.K. in more than a century . There ’s nobody well , perhaps , to communicate her country ’s rage for horticulture and plant aggregation than Price , who brings a subtle artistry to planting pattern that belie her garden ’ underlying , very British hardiness . Together with her regaining to Chelsea in May with a show garden forThe Daily Telegraph , her Olympic bid has the closely - knit gardening community of interests agreeing ( for once ) on one thing : 2012 will be the year of Sarah Price .
The residential garden in Garsington , Oxfordshire , co - created with fellow designer Alice Bowe , carry plants signature to Sarah Price ’s study , includingSedum autumnalis , Stipa gigantea , andSchizostylis coccinea‘Major . ’ Photo by : Rachel Warne . SEE MORE photograph OF HER GARDENS
Garden Design : When you first project a garden , is it about plants , mood , or function ?
Sarah Price : I think of the integrality , not the role . I design with the stress on atmosphere , but all of those aspects are of adequate grandness . It should be a balance . Gardens are about an emotional response , but the intent has to perform on all levels . I always attempt to design a space to be particular . It has to have some sort of typical fibre . We ’re all so used to generic , corporate spaces .
GD : Do you have any favorite plants or least favorite ?
SP : I like to vertically layer plant life , and I care plants with a base speech pattern and naked stem . Silphium terebinthinaceum ( prairie loading dock , an American native ) exemplifies this . It has cabbagelike leaves , which leave an speech pattern at ground level , and tall , towering , leafless halt with invisible yellow flower . I do n’t care over - multiply works that have lost their grace and scent . I recollect visiting the gardens at Hadspen House when Nori and Sandra Pope were still there and visualise lots of aquilegia ( Columbine ) that had ego - seeded . They gave a kind of pointillist effect . The gradual buildup of layers of colour really heightens visual impact .
GD : Does it count to you how long your garden last ?
SP : It all bet on circumstance . You demand to embrace short terminal figure as well as long terminus in garden design . I ’m doing the exposition borderline at the Garden Museum in London , for instance . It will only last two years , but it reaches a wide of the mark audience . For secret commissions , I always examine to use minor amount of quality materials , such as stone , that will last .
GD : What do natural industrial plant community teach you ?
SP : They attune you to the niceness of the landscape painting , even if it ’s as simple as two Tree turn toward each other . You larn how to replicate composition , how plants distribute themselves . Nature also instruct a very dissimilar notion of colour to that of an educated eye , the calendar method , the way coloring material is interspersed . Learning from nature give a mother wit of integrity to your conception . It aid if you are able to intuitively pick up on patterns , the appearance of outlying singleton , and so on . For large public spaces you demand a rule . Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough ( co - designers on the Olympian park ) have learn me a lot about this . You have to adjudicate on a target number of species per square meters so that with more than 10 square meters you will have three , and so on .
For the 2007 RHS Chelsea Flower Show entree , " A City Garden , " Price used some of her preferred specimen , includingPapaver orientale‘Patty ’s Plum . ’ Photo by : Helen Fickling . SEE MORE PHOTOS OF HER GARDENS
GD : Do you have a signature ?
SP : I love to use decorative grasses . They have such a foresightful time of year , and you’re able to layer them with bulbs . They give lightness and movement , so evocative of ferocity .
GD : How authoritative is sustainability to you ?
SP : It ’s a given that underpins all my designs . But I ’d hate it if the first thing anyone said about one of my garden was , “ This is a really sustainable garden . ” I always reckon first of how a substance abuser of the space would feel — I desire him to love and love the space rather than the underlying rule .
GD : Why did you pick garden design over fine art ?
SP : I became disillusioned with the graphics public . I eff the ephemeral nature of garden design . It ’s a transient affair and is not completely under your control . I find that less stressful than being an creative person . Garden design can present us with another sentence and dimension that we ca n’t really see . It ’s a dividing line to the way we live as adults . house painting and drawing total quite easily to me , but as an creative person you may get into a eldritch , stylistic trap .
GD : What is your favorite prick as a graphic designer ?
SP : We’re all so reliant on photography , we ’ve almost lost the power to draw . I still make study , very rough and mussy with a Rotring ink playpen on fine trace newspaper . I also love to make introductory model ; they ’re brilliant for an understanding of scale .
GD : Do you collect anything ?
SP : I roll up eldritch cameras , primitive old Polaroids from the fifties and sixties . Also , ephemeron , small object , mailing-card — shift things that muse where you are in your life-time . You pick up something and it will at once influence your next dodge . If I was fertile , I ’d like one of Prunella Clough ’s late abstract painting . She ’s a incessant source of intake .
This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue as " The Natural . "
See moreEnglish garden estimation .
