Imagine a garden dotted with sculptural seed heads and a luscious lawn aglow with fresh white daisies. Imagine a garden where inanimate objects come to life and where all of nature’s life cycles are celebrated, including death and decay.

Now imagine such a garden at a traditional English flower show. Introducing so-called weeds and pardoning flowers that have gone to seed from the secateurs’ blades could be considered quite risqué, but London Wildlife Trust’s Hampton Court show garden will do just that.

Playful and multi layered

The Life Cycle Garden is playful and multi layered, highlighting the ecological value and the creative potential of small urban green spaces. It focuses on the importance of being wildlife friendly, with features such as a living roof, a small pond, a broadleaved tree, a species rich hedgerow, log pile and drought resistant planting.

The garden will give people ideas for creating their own beautiful, easy to maintain, wildlife and climate friendly outdoor space. It supports the Trust’s ‘Garden for a Living London’ campaign, which highlights the importance of gardens for both people and wildlife as we face up to the realities of climate change.

Hedgerows with windows...

Sustainability is central to the garden’s design. The surfaces are being designed for maximum water absorption, there are recycled steel drums for rainwater collection and compost bins made from recycled wood. A table and chairs with planted inserts, along with a main pathway with planted inserts and a hedgerow with windows cut into it, will all provide unusual habitat for wildlife and allow the user to interact with the life cycles in the garden in a hands on way.

It will be bounded with a large scale log pile wall and a contrasting living and dead wood hedge, all of which will provide shelter, food and nesting opportunities for birds, insects and mammals. These textural boundary features, in varying stages of decay, will illustrate a chronological changing cycle of life.

Cycles and circles

Circle and cyclical motifs will feature strongly. The experience of walking along the main timber path, which will change in size and scale, and walking under distorting recycled metal hooped trellis, which will play with the light and cast interesting shadows, will draw the visitor into the circular, life cycle theme.

Elaine Hughes, London Wildlife Trust’s expert gardener says: “The Life Cycle Garden is inventive but it’s also a practical and sustainable space. The plan is to make something that is accessible as well as artistic, to create something that everyone can identify with and could replicate in some way in their own green space, be that a back yard, a small balcony or a window box.

Seed heads like fireworks...

“It invites people to find beauty in surprising places. A lawn studded with brilliant white daisies, a seed head bursting with energy like a firework, a fence made of dead wood. All these things may be a surprise at a traditional garden show but they look gorgeous and at the same time provide food and shelter for wildlife.

“We are committed to using reclaimed materials and recycling found objects. We have just a few weeks to find all the materials and build the garden. It’s a challenge but a good one. It’s making us resourceful and creative. We recently sourced some fantastic old scaffolding timber and it’s being transformed into our living shed with its green roof. Rejected materials are being given new life, literally” says Elaine.

Throughout June, a dedicated team of volunteers will be helping Elaine to create the Lifecycle Garden. Most of the work will take place at London Wildlife Trust’s Centre for Wildlife Gardening in Peckham. You can track their progress online, visit us at the Centre throughout June and at the Hampton Court Flower Show in July.

The drawing board...