It’s Saturday afternoon and one of the hottest days of the year yet. The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is a sea of sweaty sundresses, woven basket bags and overpriced cups of Pimm’s. For the last six years, Saatchi has paired a fine artist and garden designer to create a collaborative space that merges art and gardening. This year, the Saatchi Gallery garden space is a collaboration between kinetic artist Lucy Gregory and garden designer Naomi Ferret-Cohen.
Inspired by Matisse’s The Dance (1910), the garden is colourful and interactive. It is one of the few gardens in the entire show where guests are invited to walk through and enjoy the work up close. Gregory’s sculptures are colourful and dynamic—guests are welcomed to make contact with the steel limbs and set them in motion.
Fuchsia rose campions (Silene coronaria), white daisies and peachy Caucasian mulleins are dotted around the sculptures and lush greenery. A pear tree stands tall next to the magenta walls. Ferret-Cohen, when showing me around the garden, jokes, “I love putting an old and gnarly tree in the middle of the Chelsea Flower Show.”
Gregory made the silver sculpture titled Embrace (2020) during the pandemic. According to Gregory, Embrace was inspired by “being together after being apart”, a theme that carried through the designs for the new colourful renditions for the garden. The sculptor states, “I made him some new friends by taking Matisse's energy of the meadow and the moment they're dancing and spiralling around the landscape.” Each sculpture acts as its own “Ring Around the Rosie” circle. Gregory adds, “I really love the childhood memory of brushing your fingers through long grasses as you walk through a meadow, so it's meant to conjure that idea of moving, sweeping, swirling and hugging.”
As we watch Flower Show attendees interact with her sculptures, Gregory remarks, “All of my work invites people to interact with it. I see visitors as performers with the artwork; they're joining this dance in a sense.” She adds, “I tried to translate Matisse's choreography into my own design.” When asked how the space of the garden and the Chelsea Flower Show venue impacts the design of the work, Gregory laughs and then answers: “Health and safety.”
Ferret-Cohen used Gregory’s painting inspiration as a jumping-off point as well, curating a collection of plants and flowers that would bring to life the feeling of the painting. She discusses having to consider the weather and the sunlight when determining the colour palette of the garden and the previously mentioned magenta walls—a colour theory obstacle familiar across mediums.
“Especially in England, where we have grey skies, things can look quite dull, so it was trying to work out what the right colour was,” Ferret-Cohen explains. She tested eight different shades of pink before settling on the final magenta. She uses blue-tinged purple cat mints to “calm” the neon hues of the coral scarlet avens.
Their garden is a lot more colourful than the other ones on display. Ferret-Cohen says that was intentional: “We are trying to create a different feel, I suppose—a young and bright feel. Actually, it's funny, there were some school kids that came on press day, and they couldn't stop coming into this garden, looking at the colours and turning the sculptures.” Ferret-Cohen points out a butterfly that landed on a nearby flower and then adds, “I think we got it right.”
Gregory and Ferret-Cohen’s team had only eight days to set everything up, and later today, the garden will start to be dismantled. Recalling misadventures from past years, Ferret-Cohen says, “It's a big challenge every year, and there's always something that goes wrong. We had roses turn up squashed, so you have to be quite flexible and work with things that go wrong and just get on with it because you haven't got time to think about it.” Some of the garden flowers will actually be potted and sold at the show at 4 pm, and the rest will be planted at a nearby school.
It feels as if younger generations are finally catching up to older generations’ appreciation and respect for gardening and flowers as an art form. I think of all the sculptural and unusual bouquets that populate my Instagram feed. I point out that the age range at the flower show was broader and younger than I had imagined. It is exciting to see a gallery like Saatchi invest in the intersection of art and gardening.
Gregory says, “The gallery's mission statement is about creating accessible art for all, so we just carry that through into what we're doing here, which is creating an accessible space that everyone can experience and take a bit of joy and fun.” A choir singing ABBA in the distance punctuates her statement. I say goodbye, then grab an ice cream before weaving through the crowds to look at the tulips on display in the pavilion. My favourite ones are light purple and named Hot Pants.
