The garden encapsulates the last 60 years of Bloom, from inception to current day. The theme for Bloom’s 60th anniversary is friendship and the garden is designed to create a space where people in the community can come together, appreciate the taste, scent, sounds and visual impact of the garden or make new connections.
The design includes a variety of planting conditions. A grass path, flanked with vibrant beds of yellow and orange, passes floral features and art in the landscape as it sweeps up to the central platform seating area. On one side is a wild meadow suppling nectar-rich flowers for a cluster of beehives, which border wetland margins and shade planting and gives way to woodland and ferns. A wild vegetable garden gives a fresh take on grow your own in a garden which both celebrates the traditions of the past and looks forward to a blooming future.
The plants are British grown, most are grown by the design team and all will have been grown peat free and avoiding any pesticides. The wildflower plantings and bee keeping have been introduced to increase biodiversity and support an eco-system.
The designers, the father and son duo, Jon and James Wheatley run Stonebarn Landscapes a Bristol based company providing landscape construction, garden design and maintenance for both private and commercial clients. Jon Wheatley is the winner of fourteen RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medals and has been creating Gold Medal winning gardens and exhibits for over 10 years.
To celebrate Bloom, the RHS will be giving more than two million friendship flower seeds out to groups to grow, cut and give away as bouquets in their communities, and these British cut flowers will be incorporated into the garden design.
After the show, the friendship benches on the garden and the plants will be distributed to Bloom and other community gardening groups based near to Hampton Court Palace.