Partnering With Joe Perkins MSGD
As part of our commitment to championing nature-based solutions to climate change and preserving our woodlands, for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year, we joined forces with award-winning landscape designer Joe Perkins for the second year running to create our Main Avenue Garden.
The Meta Garden: Growing the Future was designed to highlight the connection between plants, soil and fungi in the woodland ecosystem, and to bring to life the complex underground communication webs found in nature.
The Meta Garden’s Award-Winning Design
The garden has an immersive design, which showcases the versatility of timber. It features a stylised meadow, showcasing almost 3,000 plants both from the UK and around the world; a woodland bank in the form of a planted timber crib wall; a rising woodland edge of trees and shrubs that overhang a freeform timber canopy and a central seating area sunken into its surroundings.
During the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Meta Garden won a Gold Medal in the Show Garden category.
Creating a Sustainable Legacy With the National Forest
“We are delighted that Joe has won an RHS Gold Medal for The Meta Garden: Growing the Future. An incredible amount of creativity, collaboration, and craft has gone into this garden, and this medal is an opportunity to celebrate the garden’s important themes of connections, communities, and how we can work together to protect our wonderful British woodlands. This year we’re proud to be partnering with the National Forest, where this gold medal-winning garden will be re-homed. The hope is that millions of people from local communities will be able to learn from and enjoy the garden in the years to come in its new home in the National Forest.”
– Steve Hatch, VP of Northern Europe, Meta
Today, over 2.2 million people in the UK are part of one of the 14,000 groups related to gardening, conservation and forestry on Facebook and #Gardening ranks in the top 1% of hashtags followed by people on Instagram in the UK. During the pandemic, we saw a rise in enthusiastic plant-lovers across the UK coming together on places like Facebook Groups and Instagram to share their gardening tips and learn from each other. We were pleased to have worked with some of these creators from the UK to celebrate the opening of The Meta Garden, as well as the people, organisations and communities that come together on our platforms to enjoy, create and maintain woodlands and green spaces.
