Plant tower, bug tower

I still have photos I took during my trip to the Chelsea Flower show in May of 2011 -- gardens I've never posted before. Here's one that was very intriguing. This is the B&Q garden, the tallest garden ever constructed for Chelsea. Its design highlights the need for communities to consider local, sustainable food growing in small footprints, while "...enhancing urban greening."

Everything growing here is edible. It has a potting shed that incorporates rainwater harvesting and storage, a thermal chimney, photovoltaic panels, and a wind turbine. It also includes "insect hotels" created by schoolkids for bats, birds, bugs, and worms.

Pleached lime and mulberry trees and clipped bay hedges are the structure to the garden that features all harvestable parts of edible plants - rhizomes, bulbs, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds.


This was quite the undertaking -- when you consider the structure is installed and displayed for just more than the week of the Flower Show. All this is brought in and constructed in a soccer field behind a veteran's retirement home. It has to be returned to its original state of a soccer field after the event. All trees, plants and structures are grown and built off site and transported here and re-assembled.

My take-away? I want to have a pleached tree. Just have to figure out where to put on in my small yard. At least they're thin and don't take up much room!

If you have food, you need to eat at a table! This was art of the garden - the table is an aquarium over a pond.

The insect hotel.

Nice looking vertical garden.