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Garden for Chelsea

New Hall's Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show: The Transit of Venus

Sue Goss designed New Hall's garden at the Chelsea Flower Show to celebrate the College's spirit of scientific enquiry. It was a Small Garden and fell within the Chic Garden category. According to the RHS, 'Chic Gardens' "should incorporate new ideas, modern materials and planting for an urban environment, with imaginative and innovative design. Stylish and possibly controversial, these spaces will be striking and bold."

Our Inspirations

The Transit of Venus

The garden contained three vertical panels, two of which incorporated mirrors. Reflections, silhouettes and shadows were intriguingly revealed as people walked past. This embodied the effects of parallax, the mathematical key which enabled calculations of our solar system. The curved path of Venus was represented by the curved wall, its coping calibrated in sections as a time line of the Transits.

Read more about the scientific and historical importance of the Transit of Venus.

An Environment on the Edge

A glass globe contained a plant from Joseph Banks' Florilegium representing a planet with a protective and stable atmosphere supporting life, like the present-day Earth. A dry and cracked globe at the front of the garden represented a planet without a life-sustaining atmosphere, like the present-day Venus. Could Earth's future be the same as Venus' if we don't protect our precious atmosphere from damage? New Hall's Environment on the Edge lecture series investigates these important issues.

Science

As well as the significance of astronomy and the environment within the garden, our design was also inspired by science in a more general way. The subtle visual tricks with distance, colour and perspective invoke the workings of microscopes and telescopes, the prismatic colour sequence incorporated in the planting emulates that of refracted light and the globe and tripod at the back of the garden are reminiscent of laboratory equipment.

The College Itself and New Hall's Unique Buildings

New Hall's Modernist architecture, excellent lighting and white walls inspired the garden's structure. This neutral setting at New Hall forms the backdrop for the New Hall Art Collection (the second largest collection of women's art in the world after the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC). This was reflected in the garden through vibrant planting and the use of sculptural form. The wall ended in a seat, representing the seat of learning.

The ephemeral nature of a flower mirrors that of youth; bright, vivid and intense, flowers are of the moment, like the experiences of student life.