The Nurture Landscapes garden: Sarah Price, low-carbon design, and the return to Benton End

With The RHS Chelsea Flower Show fast approaching, we want to share further insight into our sought-after Garden Designer, Sarah Price, and our garden ambitions. 

Where does Sarah’s design style originate from?

As a child, Sarah spent a lot of family time exploring rural landscapes, which shaped her design style. She has a real love of art, evident in her numerous paintings and drawings, which has influenced her diverse portfolio of  Private, Public, and Show Gardens designs. One of her most notable achievements is designing the 2012 Olympic park plantings. 

Sarah believes it is all about working with the intricacies of a site, to amplify what is already there and enhance wildlife. For example, she may relay existing stones into new expressive formations, rather than adding new cobbles. She prefers making  ‘wild-looking’ plants into beautiful and legible compositions, rather than sourcing new ones.  All materials are specifically sourced (including valuable waste streams) and she relies on local skills from personnel close to the site.  She believes gardening in this way balances the need for habitat creation and has a low impact on our environment. 

What made Sarah want to design a Chelsea Garden? 

Four years ago Sarah spent many hours immersed in the garden of Cedric Morris’ Benton End. Benton End is world renowned as being one of the first modern gardens of naturalistic design, with Cedric Morris breeding and planting at least 90 different Iris varieties. The Demure fritillaries and Anemone pavonina caught her eye as it scattered the long grass like an entrance and tracing. She describes this landscape as a ‘medieval mead’ and it reminded her of her love and admiration of Cedric Morris’ planting. 

This visit also triggered memories of the Benton Iris display that Sarah Cook had designed within the Chelsea Pavilion in 2015. These two experiences solidified her love for the Irises that are so graceful and subtle, lending themselves to a more ‘natural-looking’ design.  

These two experiences cultivated the idea to use the creativity and expressiveness from Benton End and reimagine and reopen the garden in a place like Chelsea. Sarah aims to educate the Chelsea public on low-carbon gardening, and challenge the wasteful consumption often associated with garden design and construction by repurposing and reusing materials.

Describe what we can expect to see from your Nurture Landscapes Garden?

As the garden takes inspiration from Cedric Morris, it will showcase a variety of textures to reflect the house at Benton End. The garden will focus on the Benton Iris, Elaeagnus Quicksilver, and other Morris cultivars – whilst maintaining a wild planting palette. The distinctive palette of pink, blue and yellow seen in two of Cedric Morris’ paintings (Cotyledon and Eggs, and The Eggs) will be reflected in the garden to offset the complex tones of Morris’ Benton Iris and his grey poppies.

As a backdrop to this ‘wild-looking’, semi-abandoned plantings – rich coloured, textured, straw-cob walls will be featured as a nod to the original pigmented plaster and bricks that the house at Benton end is made from. In perfect contrast to naturalism, there will be carefully composed and cultivated features, such as succulents in planters, where the hand of the gardener will be very much showcased.

The design explores a fresh approach to garden-making that places emphasis on craft to add aesthetic, environmental, and social value to a garden. The design incorporates waste-based materials (old brick, ash, glass, recycled plastic, oyster shell, hen shell, feathers, and wood) in a surprising way to showcase the endless possibilities of creating beautiful and sustainable creations from waste and craftsmanship.

The garden’s ambition is to be as sustainable as possible – sourcing locally, and using reclaimed materials wherever possible. This does present its own challenges as it requires a lot more time invested in research, and sourcing materials and skills.

After the show, what happens to the garden?

After Morris’ death, the garden at Benton End was dug up and distributed far and wide to various gardeners.  A nice touch post-show is that many of the plants, materials, and herbaceous grasses will find a new home at Benton End, whether it be in the house or the garden – which almost signifies the return of the ‘lost’ plants.

October 2022 – Introduction to our Show Garden 

Nurture and Crocus, both based in Windlesham and collectively employing over 2,000 employees, were established by the highly successful Fane brothers, Peter, and Mark, respectively. The two have always shared a love for all things plants and sustainability.

The garden has been designed by one of the most prominent female garden designers in Britain, Sarah Price. Sarah is trained in fine art and has a lifelong love of wild and natural environments. She has won numerous awards, including Gold Medals at Chelsea in 2012 and 2018, and is a contributing editor for Gardens Illustrated. The garden will be constructed out of sustainable building materials and will emphasise the importance of craftsmanship in how it is constructed.

The inspiration for the garden stems from the painting and plants of Cedric Morris (1889-1982) and his renowned garden at Benton End, Hadleigh, in Suffolk. He was best known for the breeding and painting of the Iris, producing around 90 named varieties. The garden design will combine hard landscaping textures reminiscent of the house at Benton End, together with a planting palette that will appear wild but will incorporate the tone of the Iris and other plants that were a feature of Cedric’s work and garden.

Nurture Landscapes founder Peter Fane commented: “We are ecstatic to be amongst the main sponsors at the flagship horticulture event of the year. Besides our sibling ties, our two companies have such a strong connection and story. Partnering together in this way and for such a prestigious event is a real boon for us, individually and commercially.

“The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is always the event of the year, and we are really looking forward to seeing what the 2023 show will reveal. It is also exciting for us to be working with such a renowned designer in Sarah Price. We have long been an admirer of Sarah’s work at previous RHS Chelsea Flower Shows and the fully sustainable theme she has chosen aligns perfectly with our ESG objectives and our journey to net zero by 2030. It also ties in with the launch of the Nurture Academy in 2023 to train future horticultural talent” 

Founder of Crocus, Mark Fane, said “Both of our businesses have grown to be best in class over the past decade and we are thrilled that Crocus will be bringing to life The Nurture Landscape Garden at the world’s most prestigious horticultural event.” In the past 20 years Crocus has won 31 Gold Medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show including 12 Best in Show awards.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 will take place between 22 and 27 May 2023.