What did the New Perennialists ever do for us?
Looking back at the many rewilding messages on display at Chelsea this year, I guess it was kind of inevitable that the march of the naturalistic movement would end up there. It’s stuff of the nth degree really. It’s not necessarily about things going in cycles, or even circles. Yet sometimes, when an evolutionary path has been taken as far as it possibly can be, suddenly the only way forward is back. Rewilding, as a horticultural concept, has been around for a good few years now, but to me, sometimes it feels like the end of the road for the naturalistic movement, and not to mention garden design. During Chelsea, Lula Urquhart, described her Best in Show garden as a ‘deeply naturalistic capturing of a really authentic landscape.’ She also described herself, and Adam Hunt the garden’s co-creator, as ‘passionate ecological restorationists’. Rewilding at Chelsea So, commencing with the English Landscape Movement of the 1700’s, when the likes of ‘Capability’ Brown and Willi...