Emerged, finally!

There has been a bit of a lapse in my blog posts. The reason is complete submersion in my two final projects for college, very different but both utterly consuming. Very little time for my garden or visits to anyone else's. Now I've emerged, just about still intact, I thought I would write just to give a flavour of the projects, see what a garden designer in training gets up to before being thrown into the big, bad world again.

Our final project has been a real privilege: to redesign part of the walled gardens at Mottisfont, a National Trust property in near Romsey in Hampshire. It's a fascinating place, and the walled gardens there are best known for housing one of the best rose collections in the world. There is part though that is fairly undeveloped now but which in its Victorian heyday was a bustling frameyard, packed with glasshouses, pineapple pits (hothouses for growing the sexiest fruit of the day), as well as beds for cut flowers, trained fruit trees etc. Our brief was open - design a contemporary garden with a nod to the history of the frameyard and Mottisfont. At 65m x 65m, the project is on a completely different scale to anything we've tackled previously. So I'll just show you a few images of the design I came up with - based on the concept of the 'lost architecture' of the frameyard and Mottisfont house, which has foundations of the original priory below the current house. For this project I used Google Sketchup a lot, which I mentioned in my last post. It is great for mocking up models and giving a background for sketching or painting over.



An overview of my proposal for The Old Frameyard - a raw Sketchup model



The garden I've designed has lots of different areas, designed to give what can be upto 3000 visitors a day a place to for exploring, relaxing in etc. Lots of the planting includes fruit, vegetables and plants used for cutting and drying, all to link back to the history of the space. There's a sunken garden inspired by the hidden foundations of the priory, a glasshouse garden, orchard, vegetable beds, seating areas and a viewing platform giving a sneak peak over the rest of the garden. So much work has gone into this but I really like the result and can just imagine now being in it!

Glasshouse garden



Sunken garden with a herb parterre and pool with rill flowing into it

I could put a lot more up here but I hope this gives you a flavour! It is all go now for our final exhibition at Chelsea Harbour on Tuesday December 13th.