The Daily Telegraph Garden by Cleve West - Best in Show 2011

The garden is loosely inspired by a visit the designer made to the Roman ruins at Ptolemais, Libya, several years ago which planted the seed in his mind to create a contemporary, sunken garden for The Telegraph.

"This Best in Show garden may at first glance look like an excavated Roman ruin; large column sculptures which are repeated through the design. One, lying on the ground, looks as if it has fallen giving the garden a sense of time passed.

Playing with this idea of time elapsing Cleve has also used plants which self-seed and has placed them as if they've drifted around the garden on a breeze filling the earthy tones of the hard landscaping with accents of yellow from parsnips grown on Cleve's own allotment and red from Dianthus cruentus." (BBC)

The garden explores how juxtaposing traditional and contemporary elements can bring a sense of permanence to a garden. Key features include a novel sunken space, using reclaimed Cotswold stone for paving and walls, beautiful trees (Sophora japonica or Japanese Pagoda Tree), and stunning contemporary sculpture.

Visitors will appreciate the contrast between the garden’s rigid framework of traditional drystone walling, contemporary sculpture and the informal planting style. Structural yew and box offer familiar structure and a foil for looser plant associations, while self-seeders and colonisers suggest that  parts of the garden will shift and change in time, albeit within a rigid framework.

Plants list   

Tree

Shrubs

Herbaceous

Grasses

Ferns

Bulbs

Clematis

NEW: Add this plant list to your own 'plants I want' list:

If you wish to keep this plant list for future reference, copy the list below and use our multi-plant add (see a video explaining how to use this new feature) to upload all the plants in one-click to your own wish list:

Tree
Sophora japonica

Shrubs
Buxus sempervirens
Myrtus communis ssp ‘Tarentina’
Phlomis fruticosa
Rosmarinus officinalis
Taxus baccata
Westringia fruticosa

Herbaceous
Acaena microphylla ‘Copper Carpet’
Acanthus mollis ‘Rue Ledan’
Achillea ‘Taygetea’
Alchemilla erythropoda
Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’
Artemisia stelleriana ‘Valerie Finnis’
Bupleurum perfoliatum longifolium
Calamintha sylvatica ‘Menthe’
Centaurea Phoenix Hybrids
Centranthus albiflorus
Dianthus cruentus
Dianthus myrtinervius
Erigeron karvinskianus
Eryngium eburneum
Euphorbia myrsinites
Euphorbia cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’
Foeniculum vulgare purpureum
Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’
Geranium sanguineum ‘Album’
Hedera
Iris setosa
Libertia grandiflora
Ligusticum scoticum
Origanum vulgare
Papaver rupifragum
Pastinaca sativa
Potentilla atrosanguinea
Sagina subulata var. glabrata ‘Aurea’
Salvia nemorosa
Scabiosa columbaria subsp. ochroleuca
Sempervivum
Sisyrinchium bellum
Stylophorum lasiocarpum
Thymus pseudolanguinosis

Grasses
Calamagrostis acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’
Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Pixie Fountain’
Sesleria nitida
Stipa gigantea

Ferns
Cyrtomium falcatum
Blechnum spicant
Polystichum braunii

Bulbs
Allium atropurpureum
Allium bulgaricum
Allium moly
Allium nigrum
Allium schubertii
Allium schoenoprasum

Climbers
Clematis x diversifolia ‘Hendersonii’
Clematis ‘Arabella’