2013 - BBC Gardeners World Live / RHS Birmingham

In 2012 Neil Sutcliffe, our garden designer, entered the Metamorphosis competition run by the RHS and on this occasion Cleve West to design a garden using a set list of materials. He was chosen as one of four designers from the huge numbers of applications to go on to build his design at Gardeners World Live in 2013.

The challenge was very simple; we were given a set list of materials including sheets of mild steel, sand, galvanised grids and softwood timber and then we had to use all of these to design a garden to a set budget. The idea was to show the 100,000 visitors of the show how different designers tackled the challenge and just how different the results were!

After 2 very long, and at times very wet, weeks the garden was finished and we were awarded an RHS silver gilt medal, just missing out on Gold by a few points. The garden was titled ‘Nature lays claim’ and was based on the idea of the garden reclaiming a potentially industrial setting. Whilst the judges gave us maximum points in build and planting they felt we had not fulfilled the brief quite to its intention as the plants were all cultivated varieties and plants such as nettles and bind weed would have been present had nature truly been taking back its claim.