A team of four student garden designers who study at the Eden Project are exhibiting their award-winning show garden at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show from today (July 5) until July 10.
Their inspirational design is called Tre Wostiwedh – Cornish for “home at last” - and is based on the idea of a Cornish miner coming up from the dark depths of the earth and stepping into an exotic garden full of colour and life.
The students, Jenny Booty from Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, Lizz Dobinson from Exeter, Devon, Nicky Shellis from Portreath, Cornwall, and Tim Walker from Snowdonia, Wales, are in their first year on the HND and BSc Garden & Landscape Design courses, taught at Eden, run in collaboration with Cornwall College and awarded by Plymouth University.
The course is one of a number of university-level programmes available from the Eden Project Learning partnership.
The show garden features a body of plants evocative of Cornwall and some of the places the miners went to work, including tree ferns, bottle brush and agapanthus.
The low walls - inspired by traditional hedges of the county – are fashioned from Cornish granite. Water is carried along a copper rill into an oversized Cornish kibble, a metal bucket once used to carry ore from mines to the surface.
The students worked alongside staff and landscape contractors to build the garden at Hampton Court, the world’s largest flower show.
The group won a competition, run by the Royal Horticultural Society and BBC Local Radio, which called for budding designers to come up with a “Feel Good Front Garden” for the show.
The designers were asked to celebrate their local community and highlight the health and wellbeing benefits of gardening. The Eden students’ submission is one of four winning designs. Their garden now stands alongside other winners from Kent, Manchester and Bristol.
Programme Manager Matt James said: “I’m thrilled to see the students demonstrating their skills and expertise at Hampton Court, especially as they are only half way through their studies with us.
“To achieve a garden at Hampton Court is a fantastic achievement, which represents the hard work and dedication of these students! And I am delighted that the garden has been well received by industry peers and other eminent garden designers.”
Eden Managing Director Gordon Seabright said: “What a great accolade this is, not just for the winning team of four designers but also for our partnership with Cornwall College and Plymouth University. To receive this honour in the first year shows just how well the garden and landscape design courses are bedding in at Eden and what a rich seam of talent there is among the students.”
