Eberle's "On the Edge" Garden Wins Best in Show at Chelsea
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- Sarah Eberle designed the "On the Edge" garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, which won gold and best in show for its evocation of unprotected, modest landscapes on the fringes of towns and cities.
- The garden marks the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) centenary and launches the organization's first interactive map of England's countryside edges, collecting people's stories and memories of these overlooked places.
- Chainsaw artist Chris Wood carved a recumbent Gaia figure from fallen redwoods, with loops and swirls of willow threaded through mossy dead branches to represent her hair flowing through the glade.
- Design elements — a drystone wall, a lichen-blotched concrete farm trough with green duckweed, dog roses, hawthorn, silver birch, cow parsley, and naturalised Rodgersia and Angelica — were arranged to evoke an abandoned lane rather than a manicured show garden.
- The setting sat in deliberate contrast to urban noise, with parakeets screeching and planes rumbling overhead (Chelsea lies beneath the Heathrow flight path), reinforcing the garden's theme of wildness surviving amid infrastructure.
Why it matters: By taking best in show at the UK's most prestigious horticultural event, an explicitly political garden — one tied to a centenary campaign and a new public-mapping tool — gained the platform to redirect attention to the unprotected, often-built-over land where most people actually encounter nature, giving CPRE a rare mainstream megaphone for the edgelands cause.
