Award-winning Exeter garden designer to create first Pocket Park Garden at Chelsea Flower Show

Chelsea Flower Show’s youngest ever gold medal winner and Exeter local, Hugo Bugg, is creating the flagship show garden for this year’s special one-off September Chelsea Flower Show. Collaborating with his design partner Charlotte Harris, the award-winning design duo are bringing their pocket park vision for a shared public garden to this year’s show for main sponsor M&G. They start building their urban ‘slice of green’ at the show ground this week, ready for opening to the public on Tuesday 21 September. Unusually for Chelsea, it is designed as a shared garden in a public space, challenging our usual notions of what a  garden is.

The garden includes a repurposed metal pipework sculpture of over 100 linear metres, three 12 metre high Nyssa sylvatica trees casting beautiful dappled light, re-used industrial sheet piling, reclaimed paving, and over 3,000 plants chosen for their tolerance to urban climate extremes.  Over 50 people, from contractors to horticulturalists, have been involved in making the pocket park garden designed by Charlotte and Hugo come to life.

Harris Bugg Studio is a multi award-winning landscape design practice based between two studios in Devon and London. Their projects range from large country estates to smaller private gardens, located anywhere from Cornwall to the Highlands and Exmoor to London. While the two designers have both won individual gold medals for Main Avenue gardens at Chelsea, this is their first Chelsea show garden together.

Hugo was named Young Designer of the Year by the RHS in 2010 and is the youngest ever gold medal winner at Chelsea Flower Show for his garden in 2014.  He studied garden design at Falmouth University. 

Described as ‘pioneering design talents of their generation’ by the RHS, Charlotte and Hugo are known for making gardens that tell stories that reflect the spirit of place. For The M&G Garden they have imagined a gritty, industrial past and show how reclaimed materials and unloved remnants can be transformed into something extraordinary and authentic.

The M&G Garden is about transforming neglected, unloved areas into new, tranquil and beautiful green spaces in the places we need them most - our towns and cities. Pocket park-like in design, the garden is imagined as a peaceful oasis - a public space for people and wildlife to share and enjoy all the benefits of being in nature.

Hugo Bugg, co-designer of The M&G garden, said: “It’s a brilliant feeling to be back at Chelsea and bringing our vision for this pocket park garden alive. Creating networks of green spaces in our towns and cities is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but as fundamental in our urban infrastructure as transport, power and water.”

Charlotte Harris, co-designer of The M&G Garden, said: “Our aim is to inspire designers, decision-makers, developers and communities to see how even the most unlikely of places can be transformed into welcoming and sustainable green spaces in towns and cities everywhere, and how those places can make a big impact to people’s lives in our towns and cities. Now, more than ever, we have the opportunity to make green space at the heart of how we rethink high streets and town centres from grey to green.”

The M&G Garden was originally designed prior to the coronavirus pandemic to explore how more shared gardens and green spaces could be injected into our growing towns and cities. Now, following the pandemic, the garden’s potential impact as vital lifeline is even more relevant, highlighting our profound and innate need to connect with nature as well as providing the many the climate, human and biodiversity benefits green infrastructure can bring.

The M&G Garden designed by Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg is being brought to life by Crocus.