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Home  News Future good as gold for Ellerslie
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Future good as gold for Ellerslie
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Thursday, 09 February 2012
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 Organisers of the 2012 Ellerslie International Flower Show are expecting ‘shining’ examples to feature at this year’s event.
Four past gold medal winners – Xanthe White, Tim Feather, Ben Hoyle and the Canterbury Horticultural Society – return turn to create either an inner-city courtyard or rooftop garden for Christchurch of the future.
The designers will each design a City in a Garden, to provide a new look for the city as it rebuilds following last year’s devastating earthquakes.
Xanthe, who has won two sliver gilt awards at the world’s prestigious Chelsea Flower Show and several medals at Ellerslie, says her 2012 garden has two sides.
“The garden has duality, embracing Christchurch’s heritage through stone work and classicism, while looking to the future with a contemporary courtyard where diversity in planting gives the garden complexity.”
She says the garden retains the most beautiful aspects of the city’s heritage in a lush planted green garden, complete with water feature, transitioning into a dry, arid garden featuring a marble sculpture by Tim Royall.
Sponsored by Daltons, Xanthe’s garden will also aim for sustainability through its design, bringing heating and cooling elements into the garden, with a mix of native plants and flowers.
“The garden will be about aspiration with a balance of architecture and the magic of plants,” she says. “It will be beautiful with a fresh city edge for the future.”
Ben Hoyle’s, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not garden is “a little bit out there” and captures Cantabrians’ love/hate relationship with their ever-changing environment.
His courtyard will be a giant water lily, about seven metres wide and two metres tall, floating in the middle of a still pond.
Giant petals will spread out across the water, with two or three broken and floating in the pond. The water lily petals will form hammock-style seating and fan around a communal area set with a central fire pit.
“What I am creating is a garden in the water,” says Ben. “Normally, it is the other way round – you punctuate a landscape with a water element. This provides an opportunity to mentally and physically float away from the ground as the garden is insulated by water which acts as something of a shock absorber.
“Demolition material such as bricks and broken concrete from the city will be used to form gabion walls around the garden in a symbolic process of the historic past providing the core of a solid foundation for the future.”
Aged just 21 when he took part and won silver at his first Ellerslie Show in 1998, Ben has since competed at eight Ellerslie shows and has his efforts have been rewarded by a fistful of gold medals. Most recently the talented designer won the Gold and the Supreme Peace Award in 2010 while representing New Zealand at the Gardening World Cup in Japan.
 Christchurch’s Tony Milne is designing the garden on behalf of the Canterbury Horticultural Society, which won gold at the 2009 Show with its A Taste of Tomorrow garden, designed by Rob Watson.
Tony says the name of his garden ‘Love (in) Your Garden’ is a play on the Society’s new slogan designed to inspire a new generation of gardeners.
His rooftop garden tells a love story combining aspects of romance, fertility and resilience through a sculptural display of abstracted flower anatomy, drawing inspiration from the older love gods.
“A grove of 12 stamens dance around the pistil in a display of affection that will ultimately regenerate new life, reminding us of the resilience of the flowering plant life cycle to survive even in the most damaged environment.”
Tony says the top of the stamens, the anther will be filled with a number of items needed to survive in the event of a disaster, symbolic of the sustenance required to be self-sustaining and resilient.
The garden will also allude to alternative energy sources, include drifts of wildflowers blooming among crushed rubble. The walls will feature William Morris prints, peppered with an abstraction of words from Shakespeare’s works and various love stories.
A selection of four whimsical pop-up and portable courtyard gardens inspired by the recent earthquakes in Christchurch, Tim Feather’s, A Moveable Feast depicts, the challenges the city faces in designing the gardens of the future.
He says the garden, sponsored by Bay Audiology, allows visitors to select a courtyard that reflects their mood and to change or reconfigure elements to enhance their enjoyment.
“There is a lot of humour in the garden which I think visitors to the show will enjoy; everyone should have a bit of a chuckle.”
In addition to Easy Listening and Disco Courtyards, the garden includes a Seismic Shuffle Courtyard, where visitors can rearrange the decking segments to create a different look every day.
The Liquefaction Blues Courtyard features a pool, deck chairs and beach balls leading through to an overgrown garden with vegetables and fruit trees.
No stranger to Ellerslie, Tim says he was a serial Ellerslie exhibitor when the show was held in Auckland. He has won gold, silver and bronze medals at previous events.
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