BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair Beautiful Border winners announced
The Autumn Fair’s Beautiful Borders are compact 9×9 show gardens packed with creative design features and planting, offering inspiration and achievable ideas for visitors with small garden spaces and challenging places. This year’s Beautiful Border theme is ‘My Garden Escape’.
Awards were presented to talented garden designers on the opening day of the BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair, in association with English Heritage, at Audley End House and Gardens, Saffron Walden.
The winner of Best Beautiful Border and a Platinum award was Hertfordshire-based Rachel Sporborg from Rachel Sporborg Design. Her Border design, Free Thinking, was inspired by artist David Tremlett’s wall drawing, Drawing for Free Thinking, installed at Tate Britain’s Manton Stairwell. The Border contrasts rigid hard landscaping with soft, relaxing movement in the planting and offers a vision of the garden as a way to escape and relax from the constraints of modern life. Drawing the eye in, an expansive steel arch frames the planting and a central circulating water feature designed for physical and contemplative reflection. The autumnal planting includes grasses and perennials with a Viburnum Plicatum ‘Watanabe’ as the signature shrub.
Winner of the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Subscriber Border Award was Consuelo Franco, Assistant Head Gardener at Ballynatray House Estate in Waterford, for On Cloud 9, a Border design inspired by country walks, open skies and the ever-changing cloudscape.
“Rachel’s design has great presence and visual appeal, complemented by a restricted planting palette that carried off the vision with great panache.”
Rachel Poletti-Gadd, Portfolio Director – Gardening Division at Immediate Live, organisers of the BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair, said: “Following the Autumn Fair’s successful launch last year, we are absolutely delighted that so many talented designers applied to enter this year’s Beautiful Borders competition. The Beautiful Borders offer show visitors a huge range of ideas to take home and try in their own gardens. A lot of hard work, dedication and commitment goes into designing and building Beautiful Borders and we wish Rachel and Consuela our hearty congratulations.”
“We loved the artistry in Consuelo’s Border which was underpinned by a diverse range of interesting plants.”
