Shot! Kinetica!
Getting up close with John Warland’s moving show garden at the 2017 RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

I’ve been shooting show gardens at Chelsea and Hampton Court for the past seven years and always wondered why so few had any moving elements. In most gardens, the only movement are the flowers in the wind. Last year at Chelsea, Diarmuid Gavin’s British Eccentrics Garden for Harrod’s did feature moving parts, but if I’m honest it felt more theme park than show garden.
When reviewing this year’s Hampton Court show, I was so busy focusing on two of the show gardens and some of the art pieces, I completely forgot to even look at my photos of the one garden I probably spent most of my time shooting.
Other shoots then took up my attention and it was nearly seven weeks later that I remembered I had a whole bunch of unedited images to go through.
Sited closest to the site entrance, Kinetica was both the first show garden I saw and the last I shot. Arguably more an art installation, than a conventional garden, as its name suggests, Kinetica was all about movement and while my images don’t capture that, there were other aspects of the garden that appealed to me. Like most RHS show gardens these days it had an overarching storyline — in this case, it was inspired by the particle theory. For me, its narrative wasn’t important. What was, was how it looked.

The garden’s core concept was filling the square plot with 24 corten steel round bowls. Most of these yellow bowls were filled with water, but on nine of them were bright red planters each containing a small silver-barked Himalayan birch (Betula utilis jacquemontii)
These planters had perforated holes and curved bases. Pendulums in the ground kept the containers swaying so the trees could pivot in the wind. I thought the planters themselves were very attractive. Speaking to John Warland, the garden’s designer, I learnt they were made of powdercoated metal and had been specially created for the garden. That was even more impressive when he told me the budget for the entire garden was a mere £5,000!

The combination of the planters, the bowls and the black water they contained not only produced a lot of colour, but provided some visually interesting graphic backdrops for shooting the plants. And, as the garden was a square, it was possible to walk right around it and get lots of interesting angles to shoot it.

Unlike so many show gardens, Kinetica kept its planting down to just a handful of varieties. The most prevalent of them being Pheasant’s tail grass (Anemanthele lessoniana) Over the years, I’ve learnt the importance grasses give in providing subtle visual interest to floral images.

The two best flowers to photograph were Globe Thistle (Echinops ritro) and Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) Although very different in appearance, both have round flowerheads. Echinops is a tight ball of blue/mauve spikes, while fennel’s flowers are bigger and much looser. What both benefit from is being shot against a contrasting plain background,

My favourite image from the shoot is this ultra close-up of a single Echninops shot against the red of the planter. What I particularly like about it is it’s such a graphic, modern image. It’s also in complete contrast to the usual photos you see of show gardens, which tend to include as much of the garden as possible.
For me, the most interesting shot of the Kinetica garden would have been taken from above, seeing it either straight down or from an angle. Unfortunately there was no vantage point at Hampton Court to achieve that, which is why I went the other way and got in as close as I could.

Being a conceptual garden, I thought Kinetica was really impressive. What’s more, it was one of the few gardens that actually looked identical to its original rendering. The judges awarded it a silver-gilt, which is one below a gold. But what this garden had over all the others at Hampton Court was a great commercial idea: I can see a big future for those perforated planters. It will be interesting to see whether Paneltech, the garden’s Sussex-based sponsor, puts them into production.
To my way of thinking, the RHS should be encouraging more designers and manufacturers to include features on their gardens that could have potential to be commercially viable. Perhaps they should also introduce a new award, specially for the show gardens, specifically for Innovation.

Behind the image: All my images were shot handheld with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and either the 12–40 2.8 Pro or the 75 1.8 lens. Shot at Hampton Court on 3 July 2017.

See The Frustrated Gardener’s Kinetica review here
See my review of Sadie Mae Stowell’s The Oregon Garden here
See my review of Tom Massey’s The Perennial Sanctuary Garden here
See my review of the five best artworks at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show here
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See more of my images at 500px
