Behind the Design: Wild Child Cornwall at RHS Hampton Court

Wild Child Cornwall was my first solo show garden. It’s built to a Pocket Planting brief — a small, densely-planted area meant to demonstrate what’s possible in a tight space — and it took Silver Gilt in that category at RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival earlier this year.

The Pocket Planting category asks designers to work in about 3 x 3 metres. Small enough that every plant choice matters; large enough that you can’t get away with a single strong idea repeated. I wanted the garden to do three things at once: read as unmistakably Cornish, demonstrate planting that would actually survive Cornish conditions, and feel wild without being messy — the difference between neglect and intentional looseness.

The scheme was built around plants that are honest for the north-Cornish coast. Structural coastals — Escallonia, Griselinia, Olearia, Sea Buckthorn — doing the sheltering work. Textural grasses (Stipa tenuissima, Stipa gigantea, small Miscanthus). Silver-blue foliage (Astelia, Eryngium) for the light-catching layer. Flowering perennials that can take it (Achillea, Erigeron karvinskianus, Verbena bonariensis). Echium pininana as sub-tropical punctuation. And Thrift at ground level, because you can’t make a Cornish garden without it.

Wild Child Cornwall isn’t a show garden that gets skipped and forgotten. The planting scheme has been relocated to Perranporth as a permanent community installation.