The garden - A Rewilding Britain Landscape by first-time Chelsea designers Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt - may lack the flower show's usual eye-catching blooms but features a beaver dam, a pool with a lodge, a shabby shed with a corrugated iron roof and UK native plants.
Judges were won over by its evocation of a rewilded landscape in south-west England, which used West Country stone, reclaimed timber and sticks pre-gnawed by beavers, with the dam representing are-established colony of the species.
Beavers have been reintroduced to parts of the country after becoming extinct in the UK 400 years ago.
The garden, designed for the charity Rewilding Britain, aimed to show their role as incredible bioengineers within a natural ecosystem, and incorporated crack willow, hawthorn and alder.
Unusually for the show, native grasses are shown as they would be seen in the wild, with their previous year's growth and their pre-season seed-head remnants left on, together with the brown, former season's dead foliage. A soundscape included the tail slap of the beaver and the creature's mewing.
This story is from the May 25, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the May 25, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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