Chelsea Flower Show 2006
Laurent Perrier Garden designed by Jinny Blom
Wall and Pillars built for Chelsea Flower Show
I was approached by top Garden designer Jinny Blom to work with her on the garden she was designing for her clients Laurent Perrier. Jinny wanted to create a feature that represented the hard chalky soil of her native France to act as a backdrop for her planting scheme that was to be quintessentially British. She asked me to build a wall in light, almost white chalk known as Clunch that had to be crafted to give a wall with an irregular pattern of the stone to provide interest, shape and form. The wall was set off with two pillars capped by two pier caps that I also carved.
“It was the logistics of building the wall that were the real challenge for me in this particular design.The build up to the Chelsea Flower Show is very intense, the garden is in a tight working space and there are a lot of other people involved in creating it. A wall of this size would normally take me in the region of 6 – 7 weeks but I was allocated only 9 days on site”.
To overcome the logistics problem I built the wall by creating a series of panels in my Perth workshop. Each of these panels weighed over a ton and the whole lot had to be transported 500 miles on the back of a lorry to London. “I was nervous about whether the wall sections would survive the journey. I was using a dry-stone wall technique but by building in panels there was not the normal strength that comes from interlacing the stones. We wrapped each section in plastic and crossed our fingers but they all survived the journey. This allowed me to work on site with a minimum amount of stone and space, which suited everybody.”
To complete the wall on site I put in 2 weeks of 12 hour shifts but in the end, the wall was complete on time. The Laurent Perrier Garden won a Silver Gilt medal at the show.
