06.29.09
Canary Island garden
Climate change has had an enormous impact on the Canary Islands, whose rugged volcanic landscape and unique native flora have inspired one of this year’s most dramatic show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, the Canary Island’s Spa Garden. The lush, exotic beauty of the Islands’ has made them a magnet for beach-loving sun-seekers as we all know, but this exhibit aims to offer an alternative view.
“There is so much more to the Canary Islands than sun, sea and sand,” says David Cubero, a professional florist, award-winning garden designer and Canary Island native, who collaborated on the design with James Wong, an ethnobotanist who will be familiar to many from the BBC2 series Grow Your Own Drugs.
“We wanted to show a side of the islands that many visitors never see – a unique, remote archipelago of breathtaking landscapes and utterly unique plant life.” This strikingly modern garden, the pair’s first design for Chelsea, is set 1,000m above sea level within the collapsed crater of an extinct volcano.
At its centre is a bathing pavilion, surrounded by a steaming spa (a stunning effect that has been achieved with mist-scaping, which is used on film sets), with gushing fountains, and both covered and open-air bathing areas. The water is from a natural spring – reducing the design’s reliance on costly desalinated seawater – which generates enough heat to power the pumps and lighting. It will even benefit the island’s wildlife by providing food, water and shelter. As well as blurring the distinction between inside and outside space, the garden juxtaposes nature and artifice by framing its exuberant, naturalistic planting – designed to mimic the native vegetation that lies between the island’s endemic highland cloud forest and its rugged arid lowland – with the disciplined lines and angles of hard landscaping.
“David and I have been keen to challenge many of the conventional beliefs of how gardens ’should’ look,” says James. “Like many parts of the world, the Canary Islands have tended to look abroad for their horticultural inspiration, with gardeners struggling against climate to create idealised pastoral landscapes. In this design we aim to discard these imported concepts and create a truly Canarian garden that embraces local climate, planting, landscape and materials.”
Working with the environment, natural springs, monochrome blocks of lava and soaring palms have replaced traditional manicured lawns and flower borders. Showpieces include the statuesque 1.9m Dragon’s Blood Tree (Dracaena draco) dracaena aborea, which is familiar as a houseplant in this country but was once sacred to the island’s Guanche people and is becoming increasingly rare in the wild, the lush fronds of Woodwardia ferns (Woodwardia radicans is close to a native Canarian tree fern) and Euphorbia mellifera, which is popular in British gardens but close is to extinction in its natural home.
All of the plants have been sourced in Britain or Europe instead of being flown from their homeland “We decided that all our plants would come from within 300 miles of the showground,” says James. “This was for environmental reasons but also because many of them, such as echiums, are simply not cultivated in the Canary Islands, where they are considered to be little better then weeds. Luckily we managed to find nearly everything we wanted in Cornish and Dutch nurseries.” Even the “lava” rock is actually clinker, a by-product from British coal-fired power stations that the designers have recycled.
When the garden is eventually dismantled all the planting will be donated to charitable projects – most notably the Chelsea Physic Garden. “Their exotics were decimated by the harsh winter weather,” James explains. “We have plants of a size that they would never normally be able to afford, so we are thrilled that we can contribute them to this world-famous educational botanic garden.”
So now there will always be a little bit of Canarian sunshine in Chelsea.