Chelsea - Top Awards
Three University of Greenwich graduates have had outstanding successes at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.
Sarah Eberle won Gold and the top title of Best Garden in Show for her terrestrial Mars garden “600 Days with Bradstone”. Meanwhile, Gabrielle Papa took Silver Gilt for her Daily Telegraph Garden and Haruko Seki was awarded Bronze for the Studio Lasso: Garden of Transience.
The three show garden winners are all graduates of the Department of Landscape and Garden Design at the School of Architecture & Construction at the University of Greenwich where they were taught by Principal Lecturer Tom Turner.
Mr Turner, who went to Chelsea Flower on Wednesday to see their winning designs, said: “This is a remarkable achievement. Sarah had been planning her space age design for more than eight years”.
“Her garden represents the personal space of an astronaut on a tour of duty on Mars and how they would enrich their life and the plants they would grow to enhance their existence and their life support systems”.
“It is rare for a garden design to make a contribution to space exploration, but one can imagine Sarah’s vision helping NASA to think what it might be like for astronauts to live on another planet”.
“It is a fascinating and groundbreaking idea which has caught the imagination of both the judges and the general public”.
“Sarah, who has now made her home in Hampshire, qualified in 1980. She is the only student I can remember who finished all her design work a full week before the final examinations and gave me a fully coloured set of her drawings for my records”.
“It is also a pleasure to see the top award at Chelsea going to a trained designer, instead of a horticulturalist and it confirms our School’s view that we run one of the top three landscape and garden courses in the world, with the others at Versailles and Harvard”.
And Ms Eberle believes that the principles she learned as a student of Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich have been a critical factor in her success.
“You need to understand how to work with big areas before you can contemplate going into specialist fields such as garden design”.
“Without my training, and the support of my tutors, I could never have achieved so much. In fact, it was Tom who recognised my independent spirit when I was in my final year and advised me not to try and build a corporate career but to strike out on my own. He was so right and I have never looked back”, she said.
For further information about studying Landscape and Garden Design at the University of Greenwich visit: www.greenwich.ac.uk or call 0800 005 006.
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