Cardiff Council and Llandaff North Residents' Association have a show garden at the RHS show Cardiff 2012. Afterwards, the garden will be moved to its permanent site in Llandaff North.

28 March 2012

Problems and a lesson learned

Today I've been filling in the RHS press form, filling in a grant application form for the community noticeboard and catching up on emails etc.

I've also hit a big problem. All along I've been focused on trying to recreate the Llandaff North garden as accurately as possible for the show: the ad hoarding, hoarding safety/access strip, 6 ft black fence, street light and odd shaped site, that we cannot alter as part of our site lease. However, as previously mentioned, I've had to make some essential changes to the design for the show: I've actually straightened up the site a bit for the show and made the ad hoarding a mural and moved it to the back of the garden for aesthetic reasons, replacing it with the black wooden fence on the left hand boundary.

However, I haven't given much thought to how the garden sits within the lineup of other gardens, and the black wooden fence stops the eye from travelling down the line of show gardens. We've considered lowering the fence height towards the front to 0.8m (+0.45m staging), but when you stand in the garden it doesn't look like a fence, but more like a trip hazard! We've considered flipping the design from left to right, which would be the ideal solution, so the public can see into the garden as they approach, but the build is well underway and I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Luckily I was able to discuss the problem with the show manager, Lucinda, who was really helpful.

I reluctantly texted Colin today on his day off to see if flipping the design was possible. To his credit he didn't swear in the text back(!), and later very kindly texted me a suggestion to get round the problem. So I'm planning a visit to the nursery tomorrow to discuss.


Certainly a lesson learned!


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