Some of you may remember the Listening Garden I did in association with some clever sound artists at Chelsea 2017 (if you don’t it is on this website somewhere). The Royal Horticultural Society invited me to recreate it for the Vincent Square, London Show in April 20128.
Rather than just doing the same thing – which would have been a bit unimaginative – I thought it would be interesting to recreate a woodland floor and then make it shift and quiver as if something large was stirring just below the surface. My, slightly pretentious, personal title for the garden was The Dryad Awakens.
We gathered lots of beech leaves from woodland floors in places as far apart as Cornwall, Wisley, Oxfordshire and the Savernake Forest and shipped them to London. Teamed with two galvanised steel drinking troughs, a vanload of plants from Hortus Loci and the expertise of Elephonic Sound.
They managed to make the floor quiver and the water jump using a clever mixture of strategically placed speakers and ingeniously composed soundscapes.
The garden was only there for a couple of days but it was fun to do.
