The Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) has announced the winners of its design awards for 2016 -- and the top prize this year went to Carrie Preston of Studio TOOP in the Netherlands for a Show Garden created in collaboration with Jasper Helmantel of Cruydt Hoeck for the Appeltern Garden Festival.
The designer fused together three model gardens in a project aimed at making sustainable gardening more accessible to the public and demonstrating how homeowners could achieve the same results in their own backyards. The project, called "The Inclusive Garden," is paved with cement tiles, and some of those tiles are stacked into benches to provide structure for the overall design.
The design includes places for dining, for reading, sitting, or just lounging around and enjoying the site. The "benches" double as tables or hassocks, and there's also a hammock for those included to take a nap. Insect hotels are another feature, constructed from bricks or bamboo.
The planting plan includes just 26 plants -- all readily available from garden centers or from gardens of friends. Garden areas include a woodland, a meadow, and an edible garden, and you can walk over the water feature and adjacent marsh.
As one of judges put it, the garden is "brilliantly conceived, perfectly created and realized."
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