What a Show Garden Teaches You About Designing for People
Our BBC Gardeners' World Live Show Garden | SEVEN Landscape
Show gardens are a strange discipline. You build something in [NUMBER] days that has to look like it has been standing for years, in front of people who walk past in ninety seconds and make up their minds in the first ten.
That compression is the interesting part. Everything you would normally have three seasons to soften has to work immediately, and every idea you might have explained across four meetings has to land without a word of explanation. It is the closest thing our profession has to a stress test.
We took a garden to BBC Gardeners' World Live in [YEAR]. It was called [GARDEN NAME], it won [AWARD], and it changed how this practice works more than any project before or since.
Why enter at all
Show gardens are expensive, exhausting and temporary. The honest answer is that we entered because of a question that had been sitting unanswered since 2020.
That year the Landscape Institute gave me the Mark Turnbull Award for research into designing social spaces. The award funded a period of travel across Europe looking at how communities shape the places they use, and it produced a framework this practice still runs on: that a space succeeds or fails on whether the people who use it had any hand in making it.
Frameworks are easy to write and hard to prove. A show garden is a small, brutal test of whether an idea about people actually holds up when real people encounter it. So the entry was less about the medal than about finding out whether the thinking worked outside a research paper.
The concept
[GARDEN NAME] was built around [CORE CONCEPT IN ONE SENTENCE].
The design started from a simple observation from the research: people do not use a space because it is beautiful. They use it because it gives them a reason to stop. A bench facing nothing gets sat on far less than a bench facing something happening. A path that offers a choice gets walked more than a path that does not.
So the garden was arranged around [SPATIAL MOVE, eg. two seating areas at different heights, a route that doubles back, a threshold you have to pass through]. Visitors could not take it in from a single vantage point. To understand it you had to move through it, and the moment you moved through it you were part of it. Which was the entire argument.
[ONE PARAGRAPH ON A SPECIFIC DESIGN DECISION AND WHY. The more specific the better. Something a visitor commented on, or something you argued about internally.]
The planting
[PLANTING PARAGRAPH. What the palette was, what it was doing, why those species. Name six to eight plants. This is the part garden audiences read most closely and it is currently the thinnest section.]
The [MATERIAL, eg. sandstone, reclaimed brick, corten] was chosen for [REASON]. [ONE MORE SENTENCE ON MATERIALS.]
What went wrong
Every show garden has a build week story and most of them never make it into the write-up, which is a shame because it is the only part other designers actually want to read.
[WHAT WENT WRONG. Weather, a late delivery, a plant that failed, something that had to be redesigned on site. One honest paragraph. This section is what makes the post worth reading rather than worth skimming.]
[HOW IT WAS SOLVED, AND WHETHER THE FIX WAS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL PLAN.]
What it changed
The garden came down after [NUMBER] days, which is the part people find hardest to understand about show gardens. [WHERE THE GARDEN OR ITS MATERIALS WENT AFTERWARDS, IF ANYWHERE. Relocated, donated, replanted. If it was scrapped, say so, honesty reads better than silence.]
What stayed was the evidence. Watching several thousand people move through a space you designed in a single week gives you more usable information about human behaviour than a year of private commissions. People sat where we had guessed they would sit. They also stopped in a place we had not designed for at all, [WHAT AND WHY IF KNOWN], which is the sort of thing you only learn by watching.
That has fed directly into how we run co-design now. When we work with a community on a shared space, the process is not a consultation exercise bolted onto a finished design. It starts before the design exists, because the show garden confirmed the thing the research suggested: the people who will use a place know things about it that the designer cannot work out alone.
Where this leads
Most of what we do is quieter than a show garden. Private gardens in Seaford and Lewes, landscape strategies for developers, play spaces and school grounds. None of it comes with a judging panel.
But the principle is the same one that got tested in [NUMBER] days in [MONTH, YEAR]. Design for how people actually behave, not for how a drawing looks. Everything else follows from that.
If you have a garden, a development or a community space you would like to talk about, have a look at what we do or get in touch. The first conversation is free and there is no obligation attached to it.