Homebase Cornish Memories Garden

Childhood carves tracks which periodically resurface in our future lives as here in the Homebase Cornish Memories Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2011.

Memories are very personal and individual. For Hoblyn these key ones are of Cornwall. The great valley gardens like Trebah, streams crossing beaches, the Cheesewrings of Bodmin Moor.

He has evoked those memories here: 

Just as memory is a personal thing, so too is visual taste. Necessarily I have neither the same memories nor the same taste. So approaching the garden cold:

I didn’t like the ‘nostalgic planting’. It was too sugarily colourful. I would have liked just the odd spot of colour. The pallid Rhodos with their suffusion of pale pink were definitely a bum note vis a vis the silvery granite hard landscape. The pines and the tree ferns together I just didn’t buy culturally and therefore visually.

The inevitable pavilion I neither minded nor not, but its arty backing panel inscribed with red ‘calligraphy’ I couldn’t see fitting in here.

The pots looked like they had been made by a child. Maybe Thomas Hoblyn, the child, made something like those!  

Phew, we have got all that negative stuff over! Because it was all completely wiped out by:

The silvery carved rivulet. This winding stylised stream was a thing of immense beauty:

One of the most beautiful things we saw at this Chelsea. Any one who designs that can have any medal they want, as far as I am concerned!

R