They’re not like any arum lilies you’ve even seen: massive white spears a metre high casting abstract shadows across a lawn. They make you catch your breath and squint to take them in. Yet rather than alien hybrids, these flowers are actually huge photographs suspended in glass screens.
Created by the design partnership Room 105, and shot in black and white, they bestow a dramatic intensity on the most mundane of gardens. As Chris Perry, one of the designers, says, “They’re quite enchanting. You get the interplay between light and shade and you can’t quite work out what’s real.”
The trio behind Room 105 met on the diploma in garden design at Writtle College in Essex. All had previous careers, but it soon became clear that Chris Perry, Jill Crooks and Roger Price shared a common aesthetic about gardens. After graduating they set up their own garden design and construction business, launching with a garden at the Chelsea Garden Show in 2005.
Perry first came up with the idea of using glass, Crooks specialises in photographs and Price produces the construction drawings. The production technique is also their own invention. A metal base is curved and bolted to a concrete base before the glass is fitted. The photographs are printed on to Duratran, a material used in airport advertising boards. This is suspended between two panels of glass, already curved so light bounces off them. The glass framing of the photograph is sandblasted to create a rougher texture, further playing on light and shade.
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The photographs themselves emphasise the structural qualities of their subjects. The flowers chosen, from the arum lilies to the foxglove-like Bells of Ireland (Moluccella laevis), were all picked because of their strong form. Cut flowers were used so Room 105 could arrange them and get just the shape they required.
So far they’ve stuck to black-and-white pictures, but Perry doesn’t rule out the odd splash of colour. The contrast is the most important thing, he says. The screens work best if they’re integrated into a garden; placed in front of plants rather than on the edges of a plot. As Perry says, “We’re not aiming for the look of a picture on a wall, but for something that melds into the space.” He does also say, however, that the screens work well in courtyards and on the edge of swimming pools where they “create a framework”. For Perry, though, the most magical quality of the screens is the creative use of glass. “I just love glass. It’s normally used in quite a static way, which is such a shame because it can be very dramatic”. Watching a translucent Room 105 screen in a garden in Hertfordshire, as the rays from the setting sun illuminate it, you can see what he means about the drama of glass.
Room 105, The Rookery, Hay Green, Therfield, Hertfordshire (01763 287754; www.room105.co.uk)