Landscape Juice

Interview with garden designer Luciano Giubbilei

Renowned garden designer Luciano Giubbilei doesn't give many interviews and despite his success and fame remains very private.

Landscape Juice reporter Helen Gazeley snatched twenty minutes of his time talking about his passion for his art.

Now in his fortieth year, Luciano talks of his ambitions and upcoming projects and how classical music plays its part in his working life.

Listen to Luciano Giubbilei interview (21min)

When is a conceptual garden not a conceptual garden?

Like so many, garden writer Helen Gazeley went along to this year's Hampton Court flower show, but here visit set her wondering.

Helen comments on her Weeding the Web blog: "Picturesque was one of my favourite gardens. Fundamentally Fungus was surely the least successful. And where do they really draw the line between conceptual and show?"

When is a conceptual garden not a conceptual garden? Asks Helen Gazeley.

When it’s a show garden, silly.

Visitors to Hampton Court this year surely found themselves questioning the difference as the conceptual and show gardens squared up to each other across the Garden Walk. And the contrast (actually, that should be comparison) was brought into stronger relief when I spoke to Judy Cornford who designed The Eye of the Internet Maze. “I entered it as a conceptual garden,” she said, “but they asked me to be a show garden.”

A Garden Within Doors – last week of the exhibition at the Geffrye Museum

The Geffrye Museum — the delightful museum dedicated to the living rooms of merchants’ houses through the ages — is currently running A Garden within Doors, an exhibition looking at plants and flowers in the home, writes Helen Gazeley.

The museum, set in eighteenth-century almshouses, Shoreditch, has a run of eleven rooms furnished as they would have been at different periods from the end of the 16th to the end of the 20th centuries. Each room is currently dressed with flowers, in keeping with the period. So, a swag of greenery is slung across the Tudor mantelpiece, Delftware full of scented hyacinths adorns a 17th-century table, ferns and careful arrangements feature in the mid 19th century. In the basement, the exhibition space holds paintings, books and plant holders from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Is it worth a visit? Well, in a nutshell, we can say that people have always enjoyed bringing flowers and plants into the house and occasionally fashion changes as to how and what flowers are displayed.

Last Chance to See Chesters Walled Garden

Last year brought news of the closure of one of the best loved gardens in the north of England. There’s still a chance to see it before it’s gone for good, writes Helen Gazeley.

News of the forthcoming closure of the world-renowned Chesters Walled Garden in Northumberland shocked the gardening world when it was announced last July.

The Garden Museum - Lambeth

The Garden Museum could have been a modern block of flats had it not been for the discovery of a family of famous British plant hunters buried in the graveyard.

Garden writer Helen Gazeley gives her thoughts on visiting...

The Garden Museum reopened its doors last November with a new name and a new interior.

No longer called the Museum of Garden History, it is nevertheless still in the Lambeth church that was saved from demolition in the 1970s when the tombs of the Tradescants, those seventeeth-century plant-hunters, were discovered in the churchyard.