We first exhibited at Chelsea 26 years ago. Upping our game every year, we worked with young, fledging designers who relished the opportunity to create a garden stage set for our stand.

Each and every designer collaboration has been a growth experience, friendships have been created and a reputation for excellence forged. It is this that has enabled us to consider and be considered for the exciting and terrifying opportunity of creating our own Show Garden.

In partnership with Nic Howard

For the last two years we have worked joyously with the garden designer Nic Howard. After two successive awards, for ‘Best Trade Stand in Show’ in 2016 and the ‘Director General’s Trade Stand Award’ in 2017, we felt the collaboration of David Harber, Nic Howard and Nik Edser of Langdale Landscapes as contractor was a winning combination and we had to go for the ultimate challenge of creating a show garden.

Nic and I saw the garden as a journey, a meandering voyage through time, subtle yet evolving. It needed to represent the beginnings of human influence as well as more recent developments that have a worrying impact on our environment and the planet as a whole.

All the world is a stage

The Garden is a stage set with the drama of layered theatre wings creating a sense of concealment and depth and telling the story of mankind through time.

Our narrative starts with the primaeval concept of early agriculture as defined by a rudimentary barrier to keep the unwanted out and protect life and livestock within. In the garden this is represented by the sculptural bronze ‘Enclosure’.

As we progress, we move to an area of more formalised and structured planting. This time of ‘Refinement’ is communicated by an intricately patterned sculptural screen that reflects the emerging appreciation of the aesthetic and mankind’s emotional and intellectual development.

The penultimate sculptural element in the journey, while similar to ‘Refinement’ has a more clearly defined geometric pattern, referencing the evolution of our ability to design and create for purely aesthetic enjoyment. ‘Sophistication’ has a crisp, geometric pattern inspired by nature but created by man. It has within a subtle flaw to symbolise the increasingly perceptible and very real damage our activities are having on nature and the equilibrium of the planet.

Aeon: our link to the beginning of time

Centre stage, this bold, defiant and massive bronze sculpture, above, amorphous yet refined in form, represents both the first and last moment of the journey. From the big bang of creation, the nano-second of energy from which everything was seeded, to the daunting prospect of a finite cataclysmic end, Aeon represents our link to the very beginning of time. In the Garden, it is viewed through a ‘wormhole of space and time’ represented by the alignment and aperture created by the form and positioning of the sculptural screens.

Contemplation and reflection

The ‘Bench of Contemplation’, conceived as a conversation piece and a conversation facilitator, wrought out of random strands representing human thought and DNA, encourages us to reflect upon our role in the guardianship of the environment.

It provides us with an opportunity to pause for a moment and become conscious of our past and our aspirations for the future.

A shimmering mirage-like water curtain, created from crisp, angular, contemporary, mirror-polished stainless steel, enables us to see the Garden and our journey mirrored before us.

RHS Chelsea 2018

David Harber and Savills are joining forces to celebrate the importance of outdoor art by sponsoring a Show Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The Chelsea garden, designed by the celebrated landscape designer, Nic Howard, will represent how gardens, and indeed art within the garden, have evolved over time. It will feature several new works by David Harber designed and created as a central part of the garden's narrative.

Fu rther information

Contact David Harber