The bench where I’m sitting, a naturally curved slab of beech, smells of teak oil and fresh wood. On the table in front of me are two earthenware pots in a rich warm chocolate brown glaze. Spilling from them are glaucous echeverias, their succulent leaves like plump sugared almonds. There’s the sweet lemon scent of Elaeagnus “quicksilver”, small yellow flowers tucked among silver willowy leaves. I feel hidden away in a quiet corner of a country garden, but the strident calls of ring-necked parakeets bring me back to London.
This is the Chelsea flower show and the Nurture Landscapes garden designed by Sarah Price, one of the 12 main show gardens this year. It’s inspired by the plants and the spirit of Benton End, the 16th-century manor house in Suffolk where the artist and gardener Cedric Morris lived. Benton End was a hub of creative freedom, with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash among Morris’s liberal circle. It was there that he experimented with breeding bearded irises in unusual sultry colours.
The house and garden, now gifted to the Garden Museum, are being revived as a place of art and horticulture. But here in Chelsea, Sarah’s garden is celebrating plants that Cedric collected on his winter travels. His Sicilian sweet pea, handed from gardener to gardener before returning to Benton End, is flowering against terracotta and ochre walls; walls where Sarah laid washes of plant-based paint over reclaimed canvases. Straw-cob walls are coated in lime render mixed with brick dust and sharp sand. I feel enveloped in their honey glow as the hubbub of the show recedes.
Splayed against them, casting a delicate shadow, is Rosa mutabilis, where a white-tailed bumblebee feeds. There’s tumbling wisteria, tall angelica, corydalis and ferns, native quaking grasses and wood melick. Purple black aeoniums rise from sandy planters made from reclaimed materials, textured like oaty biscuits. Apricot alliums grow through gritty gravel and two pruned Scots pines give a Mediterranean feel.
I’m thinking how the effect is wild, exuberant and yet subtle, revelling in innovation and craft, when a brimstone moth dashes through the stippled space in a sudden flash of vivid lemon.
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