CATHERINE MACDONALD was hopelessly lost. She had been wandering around the National Gallery, zigzagging from room to room, so absorbed in the artworks that she no longer knew where she was. ‘I had to go and find a map to get myself out,’ she laughs.
Her confusion was more than understandable, however. Dr MacDonald, the principal landscape designer at Landform Consultants, had been touring the National Gallery for more than three hours and hadn’t merely been admiring the paintings. She had been studying them closely to draw inspiration for her latest project: a commission by jeweller Boodles to design a garden for the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show that would mark the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary.
Dr MacDonald decided early on that she didn’t simply want to bring one painting alone to life as a garden. Instead, she harvested ideas and elements from several artworks that struck a chord with her, from a varied selection of artists encompassing the obvious (the master of garden painting, Claude Monet), the unexpected (Gustav Klimt) and the relatively obscure (Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela). In short, she says, her garden is conceived ‘almost like another room in the gallery’.
Green shoots
Claude Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond, 1899
Monet had to fight for his water garden. When he asked for permission to dig channels and create his own aquatic idyll in land he had bought across the railway tracks from his house in Giverny, Normandy, many, also taking in the arching bridge, the weeping willows and the lush banks. It was that multitude of green shades that caught Dr MacDonald’s attention: ‘I was drawn to the colour palette—it has driven the basal colour palette for the entire garden.’ She not only chose plants that matched Monet’s greens and conveyed a sense of Impressionism’s visible brushwork, but also found a special green paving stone from Cumbria: ‘It has amazing patination and almost looks as if it’s got brushstrokes within it.’
