Chelsea Flower Show 2022; The Rethink Garden
May 31, 2023
Today we have handed the blog over to Lynne Lambourne, who is known for inspiring sustainable living through her interior design, gardening and home styling, to reminisce about the 2022 Chelsea Flower Show. The AnyVan team helped Lynne to transport her props and plants to her Rethink Garden at the show.
When I was asked to design a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show to make people rethink the way they garden, I knew the brands that I worked with would have to share my values and sustainability ethos; that’s not always easy to do.
The theme of the garden was rewilding, for nature to take back control over the things that we've done to harm the planet; rewilding what we have destroyed. It was designed to make people rethink the way we have been living, and guide their thought process from climate crisis to climate consciousness.
It has a strong emphasis on reconnecting people with nature and designing wildlife friendly gardens.
The garden was very naturalistic using nature friendly plants but also using only salvaged, recycled or repurposed materials. I think the style of an over manicured garden is very dated, these days wildflower areas and naturalistic planting using plants that encourage wildlife and support our ecosystems and biodiversity are what people are looking to achieve. I included lots of things such as an old rusty petrol pump to make people question their use of fossil fuels and planted up old shopping trolleys with vegetables to make people think about food waste.
I believe that sustainability is not an option that we can choose to include in our everyday lives but a necessity. We all have the power to make small changes and together these small changes will amount to a big shared impact. Those of us with gardens have a space where we can implement some of the changes that are needed to help reduce climate change and impact sustainability but we have never really viewed our gardens as that. If we all planted a medium sized tree and it grew to maturity, that would store enough carbon equivalent to drive you more than 11 times around the planet.
It doesn’t really make sense to me that some of our gardening practices harm the planet rather than take care of it.
I have always loved being outdoors and nature and the thought of things being affected so much by our way of living that there may be no going back I find terrifying. When you love something, you do all that you can to protect it and try to inspire others to do the same.
I only design using planet friendly materials, I work hard to find new brands that make things from recycled plastic and are innovators in new planet friendly materials. I work in reverse to most designers, I have to design around what I can salvage or find to repurpose, it makes it more challenging but the impact to the planet is minimal and the result is a really unique design.
Any designer can go and buy expensive new things such as top end plants and make it beautiful but creating something from what otherwise would end up in landfill is the real challenge.
Choosing to use suppliers like local charities that change people's lives by showing the mental health benefits of gardening and growing plants means that my garden has a purpose in the community where I live too.
Sustainability is about placing your pound where you believe it can really make a difference, supporting local and supporting the kinder economy; use brands and companies that share your values.
For me, working with AnyVan was important, I wanted to keep the carbon footprint of my garden as low as possible. AnyVan balance carbon emissions by protecting rainforests.
AnyVan support the World Land Trust whose carbon balancing project aims to protect and recover 20,000 hectares of tropical rainforest in Vietnam. AnyVan are saving 8,520 tones of carbon annually and are really excited to be offsetting more with every move they do. I particularly like their business model where they assign jobs together so that only one van is sent out to one area and then the staff are trained to load the lorry in a space saving way meaning that every trip is used to its full potential minimising the carbon footprint of each journey.
The AnyVan team and I had such fun loading and unloading my weird and wonderful things for the garden! I loved how much they felt a part of my team and understood the messaging behind the design, AnyVan were quite literally a very important part of my journey (pun intended)! I only work with brands that are kind; kind to the planet, kind to their staff and kind to their customers and that’s why we make a great team.
I'm looking forward to many more crazy adventures with AnyVan with my future work as it seems we are very aligned with our values and mission.