Cool, calm and connected

The winners of the Best in Show at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year have applied the same rigorous attention to detail in this garden in the Chilterns

- Tiffany Daneff

AT the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year, Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg took home not only a gold medal for their thoughtful design for the Horatio’s Garden charity, but also won the top award of Best in Show.

The garden was a distillation of one that the team is designing for patients of The Princess Royal Spinal Injuries Centre in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, incorporating many of the features seen in SW3, which will open next year. The Chelsea judges were given the opportunity to move through the lush luxuriant planting in a wheelchair, following a beautiful and immaculately smooth terrazzo path, to experience what it will be like for patients.

A similarly considered approach—and pristine finish—underlies the studio’s work on this garden in the Chilterns, which forms between three and four acres of a 100-acre estate. The landscape goes back to Tudor times, but the present 20th-century house is Arts and Crafts in style and, in 2017, major works were undertaken to build a new west-facing wing. At that point, the owners brought in Harris Bugg Studio, initially to help with making a new garden on that side of the house. ‘We spent time with the owners,’ says Miss Harris, ‘walking around with them, hearing about what they liked and didn’t like and, gradually, started to unpick and to understand.’