Gold Award Winner: Morris & Co. Garden

Gold Award Winners: RHS Chelsea Flower Show 22’

Garden Builders x Ruth Willmott Associates

Garden Builders has teamed up with Morris & Co. & Ruth Willmott Associates to stage the celebration of craftmanship. This has been an absolute success and the Garden has won the Gold Award, the highest award that can be bestowed to a garden. Morris & Co. will be in attendance for their first ever RHS Chelsea Flower Show to showcase the traditional arts and crafts in tandem with modern-day techniques.

The Morris & Co. Garden, designed by award-winning landscape and garden designer Ruth Willmott, is inspired by the work of visionary Arts and Crafts designer William Morris, famous for his iconic wallpaper and textile designs, who spent his life championing hand-craftsmanship and traditional 2 manufacturing techniques. The garden will re-imagine back into a garden setting, two of William Morris’s most iconic wallpaper designs, inspired by his enduring love of nature and the flowers he saw around him.



To present this high level of craftmanship, Ruth Willmott, Garden Builders and a variety of other talented craftspeople, stonemasons, metal workers, water specialists and tilemakers will come together to capture William Morris’ essence and design.

GARDEN LAYOUT
Garden Builders are first choice for Garden Design in London. With experience designing and building Garden Builders are first choice for Garden Design in London. With experience designing and building family, commercial, rooftop, contemporary, small, water and award winning; we truly do cover the lot.

The garden is laid out in a quadrant design using a series of simple, inter-connecting pathways that provide routes through the garden to observe the evocative planting that inspired Morris’s patterns. The layout reflects his first wallpaper design ‘Trellis’, a pattern influenced by the rose trellis in the garden of his home in Kent. The same wallpaper pattern has inspired the rich, wildlife-friendly planting scheme for the garden.

Ruth’s ambition is to create a modern interpretation of Morris’s work, using vivacious colour and pattern to echo his designs, rather than simply replicating them. She said: "I spent many happy hours at the Morris & Co archive pouring over William Morris’s iconic pattern books and examining the original wallpaper hand-blocks when conceiving the design. I wanted to celebrate his beautiful 4 designs in the natural outdoor setting which inspired them and to bring to life the joy of being surrounded by his patterns in the form of flowers and trees.”



NATURALISTIC PLANTING
Garden Builders are renowned for their planting and can offer a wide range of garden planting ideas. Offering you a professional opinion of what we feel will compliment your home or giving you access to plenty of choice to how you want your garden.

Through an abundance of soft naturalistic planting, the garden will have a distinctly romantic feel. Many of the species in the planting palette will have a direct reference to plants depicted in the ‘Willow Boughs’ and ‘Trellis’ designs including weeping, twisted and pollarded varieties of Willow at the rear of the garden, which will flank the back and side of the pavilion adding both structure and delicacy to the garden. The planting will have a clear sense of repetition in both colour and pattern as it flows through and connects with each part of the garden, much like a Morris & Co. wallpaper. The colour-palette is 5 joyfully Medieval and will feature earthy reds and apricot tones accented with whites, blues, and restful greens.

Many of the plants have been chosen with wildlife in mind with trees and shrubs offering food and habitat for birds and insects. In particular, the garden will include Morris’s favourite Hawthorn (which can be seen as both trees and hedging), Cotoneaster, Berberis and Malus, all of which pay tribute to him as an early advocate of using native species amongst long-cultivated non-natives to attract birds and bees.

Roses, another of Morris’s favourite plants, can be seen in many forms in the garden. Where possible Ruth has chosen single flowering roses for bees. She has also selected the splendid Winged Thorn Rose ( Rosa sericea subsp. omeiensis f. pteracantha) for its spectacular red thorns echoing the rose depicted in the ‘Trellis’ design.



Elsewhere, plants that feature in other William Morris wallpaper designs will be seen including Acanthus, Meadowsweet, wild Strawberries, Jasmine and wild Honeysuckle which will be woven through the Hawthorn hedging. The garden will be Ruth Willmott’s fifth garden at RHS Chelsea and her first Show Garden on Main Avenue. Lisa Montague, CEO of Morris & Co. said: "Supporting craftsman is at the heart of Morris & Co.’s ethos and we are thrilled to be working with Ruth on a show garden that allows us to bring our heritage designs and love for craftmanship together in a spectacularly curated garden setting for all to admire. "

Morris & Co. has been lovingly crafted since 1861, with flowers and gardens being an abiding source of inspiration populating our iconic fabric and wallpaper designs. One of our core values has been to bring the beautiful outside, inside, into people’s homes and lives. By creating this fabulous outdoor space, Ruth has returned Morris & Co. to its origins, giving us the opportunity to invert that same core goal; delivering beautiful interiors, to natural exteriors.”



Here at Garden Builders, we take great pride in what we do. We have been experts in garden landscaping for nearly 25 years now, celebrating Garden Builders 25-year anniversary in 2023. This will the 12th Garden that Garden Builders have been contracted for the RHS Chelsea Flower show and we do not plan to stop there. With countless awards that we have been honoured with; we want to continue to strive for excellence and that is what we will do.



PRESS INFORMATION v For further information on the Morris & Co. Garden please contact:
Suzanne Hind or Theresa Osen at HIND + OSEN Suzanne Hind: suzanne@hindandosen.com or 07813 208 168
Theresa Osen: theresa@hindandosen.com or 07931 335 930

For further information about Morris & Co. please contact:
Katie Hing at Sanderson Group
Katie Hing: katie.hing@sandersondesigngroup.com
Telephone: 01895 221 030 or 07709 462 530