Not just houses! Chelsea award winning garden design too.....
PCA are thrilled that Darren Hawkes is celebrating a well-deserved Gold for Best Construction of a Show Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show with his design for The Lady Garden Foundation’s ‘Silent No More’ garden.
Darren approached PCA to assist with the engineering of the structural aspects which are integral to the garden, and we were only too happy to assist.
Bespoke design is something we often encounter when building houses, however bringing Darren’s vision to life presented its own design challenges. Our engineer Scott reveals the technical aspects of our design:
“We began by making a 3D model of all the primary structures to sensibly size and position the main plywood ribs, we also had to make sure the main structures were split into modules that could be easily fixed together on site. The lifting bars needed to be correctly positioned so that the structures did not wobble and could be moved easily by crane into their final positions.
Most people will not realise that the stone paths are made up of pallet sized prefabricated steel elements with the stone bedded on top. The pallets needed to be robust enough that when lifted with a forklift truck they would not distort, which would cause cracks in the stone and mortar. The pallet system allowed the path to be constructed on site quickly with only the edging stones and joints to be mortared in situ, this significantly speeded up construction on site.”
We feel honoured to have played a role behind the scenes in the success of this wonderful garden and are looking forward to seeing it in person on Friday.
Visit The Lady Garden Foundation https://www.ladygardenfoundation.com/lady-garden... to see the behind the scenes of putting the garden together and read about their mission and how they are shattering the silence around gynaecological cancers.
Visit https://darrenhawkes.com/ to see Darren’s incredible work at Chelsea and his many other beautiful gardens.
Photo credits - Chelsea Flower Show & Darren Hawkes
