THE Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show will this 12 months include a garden from St James’s, Piccadilly, in London — the primary time for a few years that a church has been represented.
A landscape architect, Robert Myers, has designed the garden to reflect the Wren Project, a restoration and rejuvenation of the Seventeenth-century church.
“We never in one million years thought we can be taking a garden to Chelsea. It feels really surprising,” the Rector of St James’s, the Revd Lucy Winkett, said this week.
The garden’s title is “Imagine the world to be different” — a fitting theme for St James’s, she says, which is thought for its hospitality, advocacy of social justice, and engagement with the encircling community.
The church’s Southwood Garden (formerly the Green Churchyard) has been a sacred public space from its starting. It was damaged in the course of the Second World War, and afterwards dedicated in memory of the Londoners who had lost their lives within the Blitz.
Fourteen resilient plant species — the Pioneer Plants — survived, and were documented by Kew Gardens within the Nineteen Forties. Some of those shall be planted within the Chelsea garden.
“Churches are certainly one of the important thing elements of urban green space,” Ms Winkett said. “In London, there are the parks, in fact, but public green space that’s open to everyone is actually vital. Quite a little bit of it became inaccessible in the course of the pandemic, when it it depended where you lived and who you were whether you had any green space to access.”
She continued: “The garden could be very well-used here. We’re two minutes from Piccadilly, which is chaotic and noisy and all of the things that central London is. Literally, two minutes, and there’s this really beautiful oasis where we observe people on daily basis coming in and just having a sit and taking a while.”
Churchyard re-landscaped, post-1940
For 35 years, a shepherd’s hut within the garden has been a seven-day-a-week drop-in centre for an hour’s free counselling for anyone who needs it, from people going through homelessness to hedge-fund managers from Jermyn Street.
“It’s vital that it’s outside, and never anywhere you have got to ring a doorbell or make an appointment or stand in reception,” Ms Winkett said. “You can just slide in and have someone take heed to you, and slide out again.
“And it’s adjoining to the church, but it surely’s not the church, and doesn’t require them to interact with the official Church, by which a few of them might need been hurt. That’s incorporated into the show garden, too.”
The Wren Project, led by Ptolemy Dean, is a £20-million scheme to open up the entire site — constructing, courtyard, garden, and rectory — in a holistic approach that’s to supply recent pedestrian routes through the location to the south and east, to enhance the connection for the general public between Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. About 40,000 people a month go through here.
New views can be opened up, and the green setting can be reinvigorated and secured for the longer term, Ms Winkett said.
“It’s absolutely concerning the people we’re serving. The physical opening as much as the south and east is a signal, or metaphor, for what we try to do, which is to be sure that we retain our outward-looking focus to the community that we serve.
“The Chelsea garden is a taste of what we hope the project will achieve, which is to amplify the heritage and be sure that it’s really accessible for everybody at the identical time.”
The Chelsea garden (“Imagine the world to be different”)
The show garden will even reference the brand new archway envisaged between Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. Some of the brickwork utilized in its construction shall be included. The garden is sponsored by Project Giving Back, which funds good causes at Chelsea, and shall be relocated after its show appearance: every element is to be replanted or reused.
The garden will even have fun the church’s wealthy heritage of transformers of society, amongst them William Blake, Ottobah Cugoano, a outstanding abolitionist, and feminine pioneers comparable to the artists Mary Beale, and Mary Delany (Diary, 10 December 2021). It was the primary church to put in photovoltaic panels, and the primary church in central London to carry funerals and memorial services for men who had died from AIDS. Archbishop William Temple was a former Rector.
Mr Myers, a six-times gold medallist on the Chelsea Flower Show, is the designer of each the Wren Project and the show garden.
“My design explores ideas around gathering, refuge, and the importance of restorative green spaces in the town, celebrating the history, social impact, and environmental commitments of the church,” he said.
Visitors to the garden will step through the archway into what’s described as “a contemplative haven”, a sanctuary for urban dwellers and city wildlife. Climate-resilient trees are a key feature of a lush, biodiverse planting scheme, inviting people to unite and nurture the traditions of “conversations under trees”.
St James’s, Piccadilly, c.1940
Ms Winkett said: “We’re taking our cue from Job, where he said, ‘Ask the animals and they’ll teach you.’ We wish to be sure that we’re taking seriously our interdependence with creation, and never our separateness from it. The conversation under a tree is different from a conversation you’re having in a boardroom or a study or a vicar’s office.”
Radio 4’s Sunday Worship on 19 May, two days before the opening of the Show, is on the theme “Conversation under a tree”.
The St James’s garden is being heralded as a probability to inform the story of churchyards and concrete “pocket parks” within the UK, and to encourage people to make use of and to have fun them.
“We just wish to spread the message of environmentally sustainable gardens as places of healing and listening,” Ms Winkett concluded. “And we would like to be sure that that this beautiful public sacred space is open to everyone and in a position to be welcoming to people of all faiths and none.”
