Chris Beardshaw
We are used to seeing Chris on our screens and listening to him on Gardener's Question Time (Radio 4) , but what makes him tick and what made him the designer and plantsman he is today?
Chris Beardshaw I started playing with shapes and planting when I was in my early teens, doing a few jobs for friends and family. In those days I would, with the help of my brother, implement them too. Then I made display beds and mock gardens in the retail nursery during my teens.
The real impression that design could make was brought home to me when designing nursery exhibition stands in my early twenties and after this I decided to add landscape architecture to my horticultural qualifications.
Being able to spend my days playing with plants and creating gardens that delight gardeners and wildlife alike.
Less who and more what. The incentive to explore design came after witnessing the radical effect on emotion a garden or even collections of plants could have on people. A garden is a wonderful tonic, an expression of personality and a theatre amongst other things.
I find it difficult to contemplate being a garden designer without the intimate knowledge that that being a gardener affords - it's a bit like writing recipes without any experience or connection with the ingredients. I firmly believe that you need to get engrossed and absorbed in the total subject.
My garden is a sequence of character spaces filled with plants that have a real appetite to thrive - I'm afraid I don't really have the patience to humour fickle plants. Rather inevitably it also contains plants that have been collected from shows, gardens and a variety of other obscure sources so sometimes maintaining a clear and coherent design principle is a challenge.
Peony, one of Chris' top 5 plants This is the most asked and most difficult question for me as it largely depends on the season, however I would place liquidambar , cercidiphyllum , rosa , paeonia , iris and geranium high on a list of 'must haves'. But then there are the ranunculus , narcissus , veronicastrum , leucanthemum and scilla , and no garden could do without some structure so tilia , taxus and fagus feature too!
I love materials that have the markings of their origin or manufacture so natural stone, wrought metals, lead, blown glass and or course crafted hardwoods all feature highly. There is something beautifully simple about employing materials that are only one step away from their raw state and on which the fingerprints of the craftsmen are still evident, it is for this reason, for example, that for me a hand thrown pot exudes so much more personality than a mass produced unit.
Allowing someone or something to compromise the beauty and purity of a designed scheme and sometimes this means being pig headed about the principles or even walking away from a scheme.
Not walking away from a scheme in which compromise was demanded and then experiencing the life and energy of the project ebb away.
My own as it is full of memories, plants with great stories and artefacts that for me encapsulate the passage of life.
Robert Lenkiewicz - since I first saw and read his work I have been touched by the sensitivity with which he expressed the world he saw, often using just a few strokes or words to completely capture the mercurial spirit of the moment.
Formal geometry overlain with floriferous tapestry.
Treat this garden as a personal vision of paradise – and only include those elements with which you wish to spend eternity.
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