My art is in the garden

Monet and Turner supplied the colours, Canaletto the structure and Klimt the patterns for the Boodles National Gallery garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

- Carla Passino

CATHERINE MACDONALD was hopelessly lost. She had been wandering around the National Gallery, zigzagging from room to room, so absorbed in the artworks that she no longer knew where she was. 'I had to go and find a map to get myself out,' she laughs.

Her confusion was more than understandable, however. Dr MacDonald, the principal landscape designer at Landform Consultants, had been touring the National Gallery for more than three hours and hadn't merely been admiring the paintings. She had been studying them closely to draw inspiration for her latest project: a commission by jeweller Boodles to design a garden for the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show that would mark the National Gallery's 200th anniversary.

Dr MacDonald decided early on that she didn't simply want to bring one painting alone to life as a garden. Instead, she harvested ideas and elements from several artworks that struck a chord with her, from a varied selection of artists encompassing the obvious (the master of garden painting, Claude Monet), the unexpected (Gustav Klimt) and the relatively obscure (Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela). In short, she says, her garden is conceived 'almost like another room in the gallery'.

Green shoots

Claude Monet's The Water-Lily Pond, 1899