Crowe Garden Design - Bespoke Garden Design In Essex

“Gardens that bewilder, enchant, delight, perplex.” The mission statement for this year’s Future Gardens garden event part of the Butterfly World Project outside St Albans. Certainly the resultant 12 gardens designed and exhibited for viewing from June to October created such a response, others merely a glancing look.

The layout in a ‘caterpillar’ form with each garden as a ‘segment’ certainly fitted in with the overall concept for the Butterfly World site but somehow this detracted from the gardens being exhibited within. There was too much a sense of viewing a selection of ‘rooms’ rather than coming across a designed space set within the site.

By laying out the site in such a way the need for a standard boundary, in this instance Quercus fencing, whilst linking the overall theme together perpetuated the sense of enclosure. (Why use a separate, more contemporary fencing around the Ivan Hicks gardens as well, getting too ‘busy’?) Overall the site was perhaps at an imbalance with the vast Antennae walks and Meadow trail but this could well be in due deference to the neighbouring site and that garden.

Certainly the impact of the vast open spaces and huge skies gave the site a lunar feel, almost outer worldly with the mammoth insect sculpture and undulating land. The wild flowers were certainly looking sensational en masse. The future installation of the Tropical Dome and the Chrysalis Lake will add significantly to the finished feel.

Of the current buildings that simply had to be enjoyed though were the Beehive buildings housing toilets. Not being one for noticing the latrines of the world these stood proud, a nice warm honey yellow décor within, but just because they are over-sized do we need an oversized hand fork and selection of plant pots? These in fact were too large in relation to the beehive toilets, consequently it caused a ‘choice’ to be made as to which one preferred. The toilets were not branded, the fork was, no contest, make for the WC.

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