Work Categories: RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2022

The garden shows a rewilding beaver habitat in the south west of England. A brook flows beneath a west-country crafted dry-stone wall, under a woodland edge of hawthorn, elder, viburnum, hazel and field maple. Beavers have entered the landscape and built a lodge and a dam which has altered the water course and created the first large pool in the garden.

The lodge, built around a white willow (salix alba) is the beavers’ family home and within it are several chambers and even a swimming pool for their young kits to learn to swim before they leave the lodge for the first time.

Below the dam, made entirely of beaver-gnawed sticks, there is evidence of the beavers’ activities: a beaver feeding station with “chop-sticks” that have had all their bark nibbled off; felled trunks, that are either decaying or regenerating; beaver “chips”, left where they have chewed away the wood in the felling process; a muddy canal made by the mammals as they pull logs and materials to and from different dams; and beaver footprints in the muddy banks of the stream.

Awarded RHS Best Show Garden 2022