Morgan Stanley is returning to Chelsea Flower Show for a third consecutive year with ‘The Morgan Stanley Garden’ designed by Chris Beardshaw.
The garden creates an exciting opportunity for young musicians from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYO) to work with Chris to compose and perform a unique piece of music inspired by the garden design.
As with Morgan Stanley’s previous Show Gardens, this garden reflects the Firm’s longstanding commitment to children’s health and education. Focusing this year on education, Morgan Stanley and Chris Beardshaw are working together with NYO, the world’s greatest orchestra of teenagers, to explore how the emotional responses created by the garden can be expressed in music, to provide an engaging multi-sensory experience.
The Morgan Stanley Garden design features three distinct areas, celebrating the opposing environments that can be experienced in British gardens. Unusually for Chelsea, the public will be able to view the garden from three sides. Each perspective will provide a contrasting planting style which can be viewed either in isolation or as a stunning cohesive whole.
The first of the planting areas is a verdant naturalistic woodland, which features a collection of specimen native Acer campestre and soft unclipped Taxus baccata and Buxus sempervirens which provoke a sense of enclosure and create pockets of light and shade. The trees are underplanted with an array of woodland perennial species, providing a lush blend of foliage textures.
The second garden space at the front of the garden provides a complete contrast, with a bright, open, and temperate sun-soaked terrace. The area is richly planted with abundant jewel coloured perennials and filled with scent. Some of the woodland trees and shrub species are repeated here, but in more formal guises, including clipped Taxus baccata specimens and a statuesque Pinus sylvestris tree.
A sinuous and informal limestone path, makes the transition through the whole garden passing through the third central space, which features a dramatic oak and limestone performance pavilion, which has been designed by Chris and inspired by his study of fractal geometry as found in nature and the structures of nature.
As with Morgan Stanley’s previous Chelsea Flower Show Gardens - The Healthy Cities Garden in 2015 and The Morgan Stanley Garden for Great Ormond Street in 2016 - the 2017 Show Garden will go on to have a sustainable life after Chelsea. The garden is being donated in its entirety to Groundwork, a community charity who will redesign and repurpose the garden, through several different educational community schemes in East London. Consistent with Morgan Stanley’s support for education , Groundwork offers young people training, apprenticeships, job opportunities and experiences that will last a lifetime.
Plant list
Specimen trees, hedging and topiary
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Herbaceous
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