A Garden that Captured the Silver Medal at the Chelsea Exhibition

Garden

In 2021, at the world-renowned Chelsea Flower Show, which has been held annually in Chelsea, London since 1913, a Russian garden won a silver medal in the Show Gardens category.

The talented landscape designer and photographer, Ekaterina Zasukhina from Yekaterinburg, became the inspiration and creator behind this remarkable garden.

Interestingly, this exhibition garden has a real prototype – an existing urban garden on the riverbank in the center of Yekaterinburg, also designed by Ekaterina. I couldn’t pass by this significant and prestigious event for all of Russia, especially Yekaterinburg, so I asked Ekaterina for an interview to learn all the details firsthand.

Let me share my impression of the garden in Yekaterinburg. When I first saw it, I wondered why such a beautiful private garden was so open to the public. If it were mine, I would have surrounded this treasure with a high fence.

But no! It turned out that this garden is public, open during the summer for everyone who wishes to visit. Previously, it was just an unattractive empty space on the slope of the Iset River. Ekaterina, the landscape designer and photographer who lives nearby, didn’t merely conceive the idea of transforming the urban landscape by incorporating a small garden in a natural style. She managed to convince the city authorities to allow the creation of an open urban garden, organized neighbors and the community to help with planting, and found the means to realize the project.

The Yekaterinburg garden has been around for five years now, and the work to improve it never ceases. In spring, I will definitely participate in the restoration of perennial plantings damaged by the careless trampling of visitors. Not everyone treats the plants with care. In pursuit of beautiful photos, they disrupt and trample the vegetation.

This disappoints Ekaterina, but she doesn’t want to spoil the view of the natural garden with fences and warning signs. Currently, Ekaterina is devising an elegant way to guide people within the paths. I’ll let you in on a secret: wrought iron peonies will be used. They will blend in with the real flowers but will block the path for inconsiderate visitors.

In 2020, Ekaterina made a bold and ambitious move: she applied to participate in the Chelsea Flower Show. Before that, only three times had Russian landscape designers participated in the exhibition, but none in the Show Gardens category. Ekaterina thought to herself, “The whole world knows about English, French, Chinese, and Italian gardens. Why is there no interest in Russian gardens? There is no such concept or style. This needs to be corrected!”

Ekaterina says that the garden for the exhibition is an exact replica of the Yekaterinburg garden. It embodies the beauty and grandeur of the Ural nature, with its powerful rivers, massive cliffs, and vast lakes. Being a patriot of her homeland and a lover of hiking and travel, Ekaterina managed to convey all the attractiveness and charm of the Ural region.

The garden was named “60° East: A Garden Between Continents” because the Ural Mountains stretch from north to south for 60 degrees, marking the border between Europe and Asia. This vibrant and colorful garden incorporates elements from both the East and the West. One of the stones in the garden bears an engraved quote that encapsulates its meaning: “Generations come and go, but the Earth remains forever.”

To learn all the intricacies of growing plants for the Chelsea Flower Show, Ekaterina found a partner on the English side. The first meeting with the head of the landscape department of a prominent English firm, Carly Kershaw, was nerve-wracking. Ekaterina was afraid they wouldn’t find common ground or like each other. But surprisingly, everything went smoothly. Ekaterina would start a sentence, and Carly would finish it. Inspired by the idea, Carly helped the Russian designer prepare the necessary documents for the application and became involved in the project’s preparations.

The exhibition was scheduled to open in May 2021, and during the winter months, all the preparations were made: plants were chosen and paid for, technical aspects were considered, and even the rocks, authentic and brought from the Urals, were selected, assembled, and dismantled like a puzzle, ready for shipping.

However, an unforeseen and unpleasant news arrived. The exhibition was postponed from May to September. Even inexperienced gardeners understand that a garden in full bloom in spring is significantly different from a garden blooming in autumn. They had to quickly revise the selection of plants, replacing the ones already chosen and paid for, ready to bloom, with others. Fortunately, everything turned out well!