Garden Design Entry

The main concept for the garden was to showcase the impact humans are having on our environment. We felt this would be best presented by creating a series of barriers, which challenge the user in the space and reflect the day to day challenges that species in nature must face as a result of the human footprint. The garden space was designed to be an interactive and unique space for families that also acted as a tool to educate younger generations. We wanted the garden to stimulate every sense and really connect people with nature.

We wanted visitors to take the ‘migration challenge’ and navigate through a series of ‘everyday’ obstacles in order to get to the untouched landscape - the desired destination. We envisioned that guests of all ages would dress up as animals and crawl, climb, jump and step over and through our landscape. The sequence of spaces would see visitors travel through an area of fragmented forest with a maze of high fencing, which required the visitors to find a route through.

This led onto an area of deforestation with cracked parched earth and dead tree trunks to navigate. On leaving this area the visitors were tasked with overcoming an extremely noisy highway/motorway; complete with lights and flashing colours. Here visitors would pass through tunnels under the road or try their luck at running through the highway/motorway to avoid the lights. Once visitors got over these obstacles they still needed to cross a landfill site. This area was designed as piled high with ‘trash/waste’ and to be a very interactive stage set within which visitors needed to scramble over tyres to find a way through whilst jets of smelly air puffed up around them.

The centrepiece of the garden was a large fallen tree trunk, within which visitors would learn about what they have seen so far and how they could make a change. They would learn about habitat destruction and ways to enhance biodiversity through small actions, such as creating wildlife bridges and breaking down the barriers, to allow nature to thrive.

Elements like stone walls, hedges and natural streams featured heavily here. Finally visitors would come upon the untouched forest but they had a choice to make: to move forward and impact on its beauty or to take another path and leave it untouched. A perspex screen divided this untouched landscape and provided messages of hope, in order to leave visitors hopeful enough to mobilise them to take action in whatever way they could.

Credit for the following images to www.Gillespies.co.uk