Southport Flower Show 2007

Silver Gilt Winning Garden

This year's Southport Flower Show theme was music. With that in mind, we set about designing and building our garden titled Rhythm and Blooms.

A Musical Design
This years garden was based on a plot 6 metres wide by 8 metres long, on a sloped site.

As our previous gardens in 2005 and 2006 were very informal in design, I wished to introduce some formality, symmetry and balance with this garden. I also wanted the planting to be more colourfull (as the title suggests) by incorporating more flowering perennials and less shrubs than in previous years.

The musical theme for the design was based around an orchestra's appearance, using dry stone walling to produce tiers to represent the deferent sections of an orchestra. The addition of a music stand on the stone patio showed the suggestion.

To provide the Rhythm for the garden, I felt that a tiered water course would create the desired effect. Enhanced by differing widths in the falls to create various speeds and sounds.

The water course ran into a crescent shaped pool, again providing symmetry to the garden.The pool was edged by a chamfered rectangular sawn stone patio to provide some dynamic interest.

The front of the garden consisted of a formal lawn dissected by a saw sandstone path. The path was lined with Lavandula 'Munstead'. The garden was finished with a low pailing fence to enhance the cottage appearance created by the planting and the dry stone walling.