PROFILE
Designer Sarah Price.
Sponsor Nurture Landscapes.
Contractor Crocus.
Plants Crocus.
Theme The ‘lost’ garden at Benton End, former home of artist Sir Cedric Morris.
After the show Many of the materials and plants will find a new home at Benton End.
Contact sarahpricelandscapes.com
The Nurture Landscapes Garden
The late artist and plantsman Sir Cedric Morris and his home, Benton End in Suffolk, were the inspiration for Sarah Price's show garden for Nuture Landscapes. “Cedric Morris was famous for his flower paintings and iris still lifes. You can see that he really understood the plants, but he was also an incredible gardener, who influenced Beth Chatto. He introduced 90 different cultivars of bearded iris,” says Sarah.
Benton End was a bohemian place, where Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines hosted a painting school that tutored the likes of Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. Neglected for many years, it is now being restored by the Garden Museum, and Sarah is hoping to transfer some of its naturalistic spirit to Chelsea. “You can see that it had so much love,” she says. “I'm also taking inspiration from the plants that Cedric Morris bred – the moody grey poppies and irises with colours that are really hard to describe, such as copper, strange off-yellows and grey-purples. It's really exciting to have that palette to compose with.”
Sarah was determined to make the show garden low carbon and sustainable. “The most pragmatic approach is to source locally, reuse and repair,” she explains. To this end, Sarah has sourced all of her materials, many waste or reclaimed, from an ‘imagined corridor’ linking the Surrey base of her contractor, Crocus, to the showground in Chelsea. Fittingly, many of the materials and plants will find a new home at Benton End after the end of the show.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
1 Richly coloured, straw-cob walls echo the original pigmented plaster and bricks of the 16th-century house at Benton End.
2 A palette of pink, blue and yellow seen in two of Cedric Morris's paintings (Cotyledon and Eggs, and The Eggs) will offset the complex tones of Morris's Benton irises and his grey poppies.
, including the rambling rose ‘Sir Cedric Morris’, supported by
