Highlights of the 2012 Chelsea Flower Show: Topiary, New English Style, and Plant Communities

In spring 2012, landscape designer Cleve West—winner of Best Show Garden at Chelsea in 2011 and 2012—told the British Society of Garden Designers he doubted garden shows influence how we design our own gardens. Trends, he argued, don't emanate from such events.

Partly true: some show gardens magnify emerging trends, but others—like mass planting of alliums—blossomed from seeds sown at Chelsea. It's easy to get bogged in details and miss wider themes. The 2012 trends I spotted: traditional topiary in various forms, the creation of "new English" style, and repetitive planting and plant communities.

The Resurgence of Topiary

Several display gardens featured topiary's return. The Brewin Dolphin Garden by Cleve West revived full-scale 19th-century topiary forms. Eight-foot yew sentinels, sourced ready-grown from a Belgian nursery, give permanence. Rustic limestone pillars hint at the revival of the traditional English country garden and the birth of the new English style.

The Brewin Dolphin Garden; designer: Cleve West; gold medal winner and Best Show Garden

Large topiary shapes set in mixed perennials appeared in Arne Maynard's Champagne Laurent-Perrier Garden. The stunning feature: a long copper-beech stilt hedge with mixed planting flowing underneath.

The Champagne Laurent-Perrier Garden; designer: Arne Maynard; gold medal winner

Low, trimmed evergreens among loose perennials were almost a signature planting of the show.

More manageable trimmed evergreens for home gardens appeared in Joe Swift's Homebase Teenage Cancer Trust Garden. Loosely clipped evergreens have shape and substance, allowing bronze bearded iris and verbascum to shine.

The Homebase Teenage Cancer Trust Garden; designer: Joe Swift; gold medal winner

Not all trends start at Chelsea, but some—like this topiary style—were reinforced as stylish. Tom Stuart-Smith used cloud-pruned box (Buxus spp.) in his 2010 Chelsea garden. Cloud pruning, originally Japanese, was possibly inspired by Jacques Wirtz's mounded box hedges in Belgium. Shaping a cloud-form hedge is easier than you think: imagine billowing clouds, cut only top layers, easier on a hedge grown out for a couple years.

Thomas Hoblyn's Arthritis Research U.K. Garden used clipped topiary enhancing borders and as boundary hedging, with influences from Italian Renaissance gardens like Villa Lante and Villa d'Este. Planting follows English herbaceous mixtures rather than German/Dutch trends.

The Arthritis Research U.K. Garden; designer: Thomas Hoblyn; silver-gilt medal winner

A long rectangular pool reflects stillness; floating stepping stones add a modern touch. At the rear, Italian cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)—classic Italian, 70 feet tall but only 6 feet wide—create punctuation points.

The New English Style

Andy Sturgeon's M & G Investments Garden echoes the return to traditional Arts and Crafts—dubbed the new English style. Simple rectangular pool, clipped evergreens, discreet mixed planting with umbellifers like ornamental cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris). Color-theme borders have been replaced by repetition planting: only three or four key plants for a naturalistic look.

The M & G Investments Garden; designer: Andy Sturgeon; gold medal winner

This image links clipped evergreens to another trend: slow change from repetitive planting to plant communities. Irregular globe-headed alliums contrast dark foliage but mirror round clipped shapes.

Repetitive Planting and Plant Communities

Repetitive planting captivated recent Chelsea shows. A 2012 garden shows clever interweaving of three to four key plants creating a naturalistic theme; harmony via restricted color range and species.

Plant community planting selects plants suited to a specific situation—marshy meadow or woodland glades—restrictive, irregular repetition. Seen in Sarah Price's Daily Telegraph Garden.

The RHS and Chelsea aren't known for extremes, but they allowed Diarmuid Gavin to construct a garden again. Last year: hanging Sky Garden. This year: a great pyramid of seven terraces with stairs, a lift, and a spiral steel slide. Birch trees grow in multilevel planting boxes linking terraces; trailing climbers cover scaffolding—a contemporary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Not much to take home except efficient footprint use and a reminder that gardens can be great fun, even if zany!

The Westland Magical Garden; designer: Diarmuid Gavin; silver-gilt medal winner