Harrods British Eccentrics Garden

London UK, 18th January 2016 – Harrods is pleased to announce its second year at the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. This year, the luxury department store will be showcasing the “Harrods British Eccentrics Garden”, designed and created by award-winning gardener and TV personality Diarmuid Gavin. 

Taking a break from his signature contemporary gardens, Gavin has designed an alternative take on a quintessentially English garden, in which he embraces flowering herbaceous perennials, formal topiary, and regimented structure.

Alongside Arts and Crafts elegance, the garden features numerous splashes of quirky eccentricity to pay homage to English cartoonist and illustrator William Heath Robinson. Heath Robinson was best known for drawings of complicated machines designed to achieve simple outcomes. In the UK, the term "Heath Robinson" entered the language during the First World War as a description of any unnecessarily complex and impracticable device, and to this day it is employed to describe temporary fixes using ingenuity, imagination and whatever materials are to hand.

Heath Robinson's playful drawings have made him one of Gavin's unconventional British heroes, and with the Heath Robinson ideology played out in the Harrods garden, the quirks, humour and eccentricities of what it means to be British are reflected. Bobbing Buxus spheres, twirling trees, pop-up flower beds, garden furniture that flips, automatic shearing topiary machines, a rotating carousel herb bed, and an octagonal folly which raises its hat in a final flourish are just some of the Heath Robinson-inspired elements.

This is a garden that contains humour, design integrity, detailed execution, and heritage. It is most certainly going to be challenging to pull it off - but then Gavin and his team wouldn't have it any other way. 

The team that Gavin has pulled together includes experts from the worlds of architecture, engineering and blacksmithing. He has also gathered some of the best growers, plantsmen, and plantswomen from the UK and Ireland. Gavin regards it as important to draw on skills from a range of generations from both the design and horticultural worlds. He is working with a technical college on the design of the garden’s moving parts and has invited one of the most celebrated plantswomen in the world , garden writer, lecturer and broadcaster Helen Dillon, to join him on the project.

To celebrate the garden and the start of the summer season, Harrods will be hosting a storewide campaign throughout the month of May featuring and a range of in-store events, including appearances by horticulture luminaries Gavin, Dillon, and more.

Trees and Shrubs:

Woodland Planting:

White and Sulphur scheme:

Blues/Purples/Pinks:

Grasses and others: