The Chelsea Flower Show, punctuated this year by heavy rain and the usual English eccentricity, can feel a world away from the dry desert climate of the UAE. But after much anticipation and fanfare and months of preparation, Kamelia Bin Zaal this week unveiled her garden, The Beauty of Islam, at the show, officially becoming the first Emirati to design a garden for the annual Royal Horticultural Society show.
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Intended to convey a positive message about the “serenity and peacefulness” of Islam, the garden features plants that reflect the spread of Islam and Arab culture, as well as trade on the Spice Route – with cardamom, fig, citrus, olive and coffee all on display. Bin Zaal’s garden – which attracted both a silver-gilt medal and a visit from Prince Charles, heir to the British throne – managed to withstand the rain that hit the flower show, which opened to the public on Tuesday and closes tomorrow.
Bin Zaal admits the garden was not at its absolute best in the British rain and gloom, given it was designed with the warmer, sunnier climes of the UAE in mind. “This is a Dubai garden,” she says. “From a design point of view, it’s very different for Chelsea.”
The Beauty of Islam certainly stood out among the 14 other show gardens – each built at a reported cost of up to £250,000 (Dh1.4 million) – competing for the top prize at Chelsea. All faced a rigorous judging process earlier in the week, before the winners were announced on Tuesday.
As a contemporary reinterpretation of the Islamic garden, Bin Zaal’s design offers a twist on the traditional courtyard layout by splitting it up to form an angular “N” shape. It features palms, fig trees cultivated in Spain that had to be acclimatised for the colder English weather, as well as a water wall inscribed with Arabic verses.
A team of landscapers and planters started work on the garden on April 28 – with as many as 15 people on the plot at a time – giving them just shy of three weeks to finish it in time for the show opening.
There were hiccups along the way, but looking back, Bin Zaal says she wouldn’t have done anything significantly differently. “Some of the plants weren’t looking so good, or as good as we thought they would, so we would either take them out completely or try something else,” she says. “But you always have backups and you always anticipate that ahead of time.”
The garden is basically two-tone, with an expanse of hard white marble surrounded by green vegetation. This, says Bin Zaal, is part of the positive image of Islam she wanted to convey – of humbleness and serenity – throughout the garden. She certainly received a positive response from the crowds of onlookers at the 160,000-capacity event. One fan was the TV presenter Angela Rippon, who told me she would be borrowing some of Bin Zaal’s concepts in her own garden in Devon, south-west England. “I’ve been nicking some ideas from Kamelia,” she says. “It’s beautiful in shape and texture. My neighbours will be thrilled.”
One noticeable trend at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show is that the show gardens are providing practical inspiration to visitors – and The Beauty of Islam did not disappoint, Rippon says. “There are very few architectural gardens [here] – the sort of things that you take photographs of and say ‘isn’t that beautiful’, but you could never transpose it to your own garden,” she says. “There is an awful lot of hands-on stuff this year, lots of ideas that you can take away and use at home.”
One visitor was less enthused about Bin Zaal’s efforts. Patrick Condren, 67, from East Sussex, England, says he loved the planting work and water feature, but was not keen on the use of white marble. “For me, there’s too much hard landscaping,” he says.
But another showgoer, Clare, from Tulse Hill in South London, says The Beauty of Islam was her favourite garden on show. “I love it – it’s really calm and tranquil. I could sit there all day.”
Though The Beauty of Islam won a respectable silver-gilt medal, it was the Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden that clinched Chelsea’s top award as Best Show Garden. The garden was designed by Dan Pearson, making his return at Chelsea after an 11-year absence, and marked the first showing by Chatsworth House, a large country estate in Derbyshire, northern England, which has 105 acres of gardens.
The garden, occupying a triangular plot, has a wild and naturalistic feel, incorporating 10 truckloads of stone shipped from a quarry in Derbyshire, and offers a reimagining of the grounds and trout stream of Chatsworth. Steve Porter, the head of gardens and landscape at Chatsworth, notes that many of the plants used thrive in wet conditions, but that some of the wild flora are also well suited to the desert climate of the UAE. “A lot of the wild flowers, the meadow plants growing at a low level, would take a lot more drought, and would be happy to be quite a lot drier than they are here,” he says. “Several of the gardens this year, particularly ours, I suppose, have this more relaxed, wild feel,” he says. “More people probably can feel that there’s something that they can achieve in their own garden.”
weekend@thenational.ae
