A burnt-out cottage decorated with embroidered cloths and surrounded by swaying barley, designed by a Ukrainian couple unable to return to their war-ravaged village, is set to be one of the unexpected highlights of the RHS’s largest flower show.
Victoria and Oleksiy Manoylo, landscape designers who were at a garden festival in Milan, Italy, when Russian troops invaded their village near Bucha and destroyed their home, have poured their trauma and defiance into the garden, which will feature at the RHS Hampton Court Palace garden festival next month.
They hope the garden will help bring in donations to a charity they have set up, Yellow and Blue Makes Green, which aims to raise awareness and funding to support the rebuilding of public parks, gardens and natural areas that have been destroyed by the war.
Now staying in Duisberg, Germany, the couple sought to convey the resilience of Ukrainians through their garden, What Does Not Burn.
“When the bombing and shelling started, we just looked from afar. We didn’t know what to do,” said Victoria, 48, “We were in shock. We tried to understand what was happening. We wanted to go home. Every week we thought one week more and we can go home. It was a terrible time, psychologically.”
They went to Germany hoping to find work and realised they were not very far from the home of Carrie Preston, a friend and show garden designer who lives in the Netherlands. It was she who came up with the idea of a show garden
“I suggested it at first because I wanted to distract them from thinking endlessly about the war. And they were in this bad place. So it was: ‘OK, let’s find a purpose,’” said Preston.
Victoria came up with the What Does Not Burn theme after talking to one of her clients back in Ukraine. The client had built his home two years ago, and she had landscaped the garden. “We had planted this beautiful garden. Now everything was burnt to the ground. Everything was ashes. Nothing remains. My client said to me: ‘We’ll plant a new garden.’”
Victoria wanted to show that the spirit of the Ukrainians “cannot be erased”. “I wanted to show the ashes; to show that Ukrainians will stand and be reborn, like a Phoenix from these ashes,” she said.
The Global Impact garden expresses Ukrainian culture and strength, as well as hope for the future. The remains of the burnt-out cottage are adorned with rushnyk, a traditional embroidered cloth used in Ukrainian rituals on occasions such as births, weddings and funerals.
The cottage will be surrounded by plants native to the country, including barley and hollyhocks. Field weeds such as wild carrot, chamomile and cornflower will be sown around wild fruit trees, such as wild pear. Inside the structure, a sculpture in the form of a tryzub, the Ukrainian trident based on the falcon, references the archetypal symbol of the phoenix rising from the flames.
The couple are relying on donations and goodwill to bring the garden to Hampton Court in time for the festival, which runs from 4 to 9 July. With some sponsorship from the Guild of Landscape Architects of Ukraine, they then hope to repurpose the garden and take it to other countries, to help raise money to rebuild Ukraine’s green spaces.
Everything from playgrounds to century-old trees, as well as gardening tools and machines, need to be replaced or restored, said Victoria. Donations can be made online.
“Everybody knows how our cities have been destroyed. Of course everybody is thinking about how to give people shelter, but not for now thinking about trees and parks and the spaces where people can recover after suffering through the war,” she said.
Preston said they did not want the garden to be “bloom and doom and heavy” for fear it might be too much for people to take in. “But you want to make sure you are not avoiding the conflict and that you are, in a visceral way, baring the truth. So it’s finding that balance of how you don’t avoid talking about how truly terrible the situation is, but you bring it in a way that expresses beauty and resilience and hope.”
