Claire Stubbings has won this year’s Provender Nurseries Garden Design Competition, run in conjunction with Capel Manor College, Enfield campus.
The collaboration is now in its fifth year, with judging taking place in March.
Each year, students follow a brief, which this year was to design a garden for a professional couple who like to entertain regularly and want a contemporary feel, and to include some screening trees with seasonal interest, winter structure, wall shrubs or climbers to clothe the walls and herbaceous planting that favours the colour red.
The design is based around the Provender Nurseries Display Garden at Capel Manor Enfield, with hard landscaping features that cannot be removed or altered. All changes can only be made in the plant choice and style of planting.
Students of garden design at Capel Manor College, Enfield campus presented their designs to Liz Hughes of Provender Nurseries, Sophie Guinness and Mark Cook of Capel Manor College. Each student talked through their designs, justifying plant choices and highlighting plants or areas of interest.
Claire’s design was selected for the simplicity provided in the planting using the repetition of form, texture and colour with the selection of plants.
Structure is provided by the use of Prunus lusitanica pleached trees and Buxus sempervirens balls of varying sizes. The red that the client requires in the brief is present in the form of repeated planting of Persicaria affinis ‘Darjeeling Red’, the red tipped Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’, and the specimen Parrotia persica ‘Vanessa’, an upright form with excellent red foliage colour in the autumn.
The colour was extended through to the spring with early flowering tulips ‘Red Hat’, ‘Greuze’ and ‘Merlot’.
