The Jo Whiley Scent Garden is one of five ‘Feel Good Gardens’ celebrating 50 years of BBC Radio 2 on display at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Each of the gardens relates to one of the five senses and aims to ‘encourage people to lose themselves amongst a feast of sights, scents, sounds, flavours and textures, to feel happier, calmer and generally better about the world.’
Designed by Tamara Bridge and Kate Savill, with help from Jo Malone, and assisted by keen gardener Radio 2’s Jo Whiley as the garden’s ambassador, the Scent Garden focusses on the visitor’s response to scent and its power to improve wellbeing.
The garden incorporates scented flowers and plants and a low, curving wall which also doubles as a seating area, backed by the soft shade of woodland planting.
To get a wide range of ideas the designers turned to social media for suggestions of aromas which bring back scent-related memories. Some of the responses are inscribed along the back of the seating area: natural scents, such as ‘tree blossom’ and ‘first spring primrose’, and the less obvious, such as ‘dusty vinyl’ and ‘smell of puppies’. ‘Freshly-turned earth’ was a favourite scent memory and, possibly surprisingly, ‘freshly baled haylage’ turned out to be the most popular of all.
Chelsea Flower Show runs until Saturday 27th May.
[Photo from the RHS website.]
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