Tina Bone, who comes from Camberton, Cambridge, down Philippa’s way, has produced this exquisitely detailed, wonderful watercolour of our Victorian Aviary garden for the Chelsea Flower Show. This is the image which will go into the official Show brochure and which will accompany all our press and media releases in the run up to the show. I’d be perfectly happy to rest on my laurels now, but apparently its the done thing to reproduce in real life what you promise in the brochure. Will this be possible, or has Tina set the bar too high? I now understand why so many of the gardens in the show brochure are represented by vague artists’ impressions.

I know I’m biased, but I think this design is stunningly beautiful. This is our first glimpse of the pebble mosaic designed by Maggy Howarth, which will form the 3 metre wide and 4 metre long pathway in our Victorian Aviary Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. All the large show gardens are on Main Avenue and we are lucky to have 15 metres of frontage to Main Avenue next door to Darmuid Gavin’s garden and looking onto the Laurent Perrier and Daily Telegraph gardens which are on the other side of the street. Maggy’s mosaic will be right alongside Main Avenue, along which 150,000 visitors will walk and no doubt look on in awe. If there were any such thing as a show stopper at Chelsea, this would be it.

Cumbria produces the best slate in Britain, from three mines, but only one mine produces slate with a golden thread. The mine with the golden thread is Kirkstone, whose genial proprietor, Nick Fecit, has kindly agreed to co-sponsor our Victorian Aviary Garden for Chelsea with the supply of the slate for the floor of our Aviary. The golden thread will marry well with the gold-leaf decoration of the Aviary. I spent the morning at the Kirkstone workshop at Skelwith Bridge choosing the slate which we will use. It was fascinating to see the processes used to produce the various slate finishes- from walling stone to polished worktops. This video shows Nick and some of his skilled craftsmen working on the slate.

Wow. This is something else. Philippa is completely dwarfed by the magnificent grandeur of the Aviary at Waddesdon Manor. The House and Grounds of Waddesdon Manor are closed at this time of year but Lord Rothschild has kindly let us visit so that we can look at the finer details of the construction and design of the aviary in preparation for building our own (slightly more modest) building for our Victorian Aviary Garden at Chelsea. We are given a warm welcome on an icily cold day by Vicky Darby, who helps to run the garden on behalf of the National Trust and Paul, their Head Gardener. Paul tells us that the Aviary was restored six years ago following a visit by Lord Rothschild to St. Petersburg where he got the idea for the stunning colour scheme of gold and blue. We will be using the same colours at Chelsea.

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We are in Philippa’s London “office”, which is the South Bank Centre in the Festival Hall, for a meeting with Mark Richardson who has taken on the role of contractor for our Chelsea garden- in other words Mark will build the garden for us. This may seem an unlikely venue for a business meeting but in fact it fits the bill very well- it’s spacious, airy and comfortable- people come here to read, to sleep, to chat and because there’s so much space the noise levels are low so that it’s a congenial place even for an intense two hours of discussion. Mark has built gardens at Chelsea before, so he knows that the time which we put in now in planning every detail can save a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth later on. And so we meticulously went through Philippa’s 24 point agenda, at the end of which I felt we’d done a good morning’s work. We have arranged to get together again next week- this time at Waddesdon manor, when we will all get to see their famed Aviary for the first time

Maggy Haworth is simply marvellous. This picture shows Maggy in her workshop with her assistant Mark showing Philippa the astonishingly intricate process involved in making her beautiful mosaics out of pebbles. Her pebble mosaics are to be found in some of the world’s grandest gardens, from Lady Arabella Lennox Boyd’s at Gresgarth to Lord Heseltine’s at Thenford. Now, she has agreed to make one for us for our Chelsea garden. Maggy’s workshop is in a barn next to her home on the top of a hill near Kirkby Lonsdale, with wonderful 360 degree views all round.
Maggy has done Chelsea before. She knows the ropes, she understands the psyche of the judges. She gave us some sage advice and after two hours of lively discussion and a lovely lunch we settled on a design. Now we will wait while Maggy performs her magic.