In celebration of the company’s 60^th anniversary, we entered a show garden into the Malvern Spring Festival.

Named after the 60-mile walking trail through the North Cotswolds, the garden used quintessential aspects of the local area as the inspiration for many of its features. The central water feature was designed to represent the many rivers that meander through the landscape, starting with a natural-style spring that ran beneath a stone bench representing the many stone bridges of the area. The water then passed over a shallow ford-like splash pool before running along a narrow, stone-sided rill.

A covered seating area was designed to resemble the timber lychgates often found at entrances to churchyards.

Planting

At one end, shade tolerant planting under three towering beech trees was reminiscent of the woodlands found on our shallow, limestone hills – complete with a small patch of bluebells that were miraculously still flowering!

At the other end, ornamental planting used a mixture of pinks and oranges amongst silver foliage. There was even a dwarf lilac that was used in the company’s 50^th anniversary garden.

Award

We achieved a bronze, which was not the medal that we had our sights on, but this was more than made up for by the comments from the public, who absolutely loved it. We lost count of the times we were told that the garden should have been a gold. As soon as the sun came out, children started running through the water feature, using the garden in exactly its intended manner. On the whole, a truly fantastic experience.