Photo credit: The Planting Studio

Award: Silver Medal

About the garden

This garden was designed to transform a prominent, neglected site at a major road junction into a beautiful gateway garden for the neighbourhood centre of Maindee, Newport. It was co-created with the community-led charity Maindee Unlimited and their volunteer gardening team, Greening Maindee, who worked to turn underused spaces into greener, safer, and more attractive areas for people and wildlife.

Maindee has the least amount of green space in Newport. The Show Garden was designed in close relation to the actual site where it was relocated, drawing attention to how unlikely spaces could be revitalised through community initiatives.

A striking trompe l’oeil mural wall, created by local artist Andy O’Rourke, provided a colourful backdrop to the garden and ran along a main path softened by planting. Additional pathways led visitors through trees and resilient, naturalistic planting into a central area featuring robust curved gabion seating and planters. These echoed art deco shapes and provided durable public seating.

The steel seating was hand crafted by Simon Probyn Sculpture in large units for public use. They formed the visual and communal centrepiece for the garden and are designed for people, plants and habitat. The seating/planters also involved community businesses Reseiclo who specialise in wood cutting and recycling and Mon Timber wood suppliers.

Design Inspiration

The shapework was inspired by two of Maindee’s iconic art deco buildings—the former swimming pool and cinema. The mural linked to other colourful murals across the district as part of the Full Colour Maindee initiative. The planting approach drew inspiration from larger public projects by Nigel Dunnett.

Purpose and Location

This garden serves as a gateway and public space for Maindee residents. It is set at the junction of Wharf Rd and Chepstow Rd, Maindee, Newport.

Key Takeaways

• The garden demonstrated the potential for transforming neglected urban spaces through community vision and activism.
• It highlighted the importance of local efforts to improve urban environments.
• It showed that public urban planting could be naturalistic, colourful, and emotionally enriching.

Highlights and Themes to Notice

Public urban planting was shown to be naturalistic, colourful, and deeply connected to our innate need for nature. The garden demonstrated that such spaces could be both robust and artful, as seen in the bespoke seating, planters, sculpture, and mural artwork.

Plants were selected for their resilience, enabling them to thrive in harsh urban environments while requiring lower maintenance—an essential consideration for long-term sustainability.

The garden highlights the importance of community support in public space creation. Volunteer groups play a vital role, dedicating time and energy to transforming grey spaces into green havens. These spaces are co-designed with the people who know them best and who would become their future custodians and users.

Topical or newsworthy elements within the garden

Greening Maindee was supported by a UK-wide initiative called Nature Neighbourhoods, launched by the People’s Plan for Nature Partnership in 2023. This project aims to empower community organisations across the UK to create people-powered plans for nature in their neighbourhoods, helping to address the global nature and climate crisis at a local level.

The initiative was led by the RSPB, National Trust, and WWF, and delivered in partnership with 18 community-led organisations, including Greening Maindee. Funding was provided by the National Lottery Community Fund and the Co-op.

Reflection of the Sponsor’s Aims

Maindee, a densely populated inner-city area, has long lacked accessible green space. Greening Maindee and Maindee Unlimited’s mission is to create productive, healthy, and convivial public spaces on neglected pockets of land, enhancing biodiversity and benefiting local residents.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, many people without access to gardens suffered due to the absence of quality outdoor space—vital for both physical and mental health. This situation brought into sharp focus the urgent need for urban greening to support community wellbeing.

A local resident survey confirmed this need, with results showing that greening the neighbourhood was a top priority.

The Gateway Garden’s Role

The Gateway Garden is established in the heart of Maindee, inviting people to come together in a safe, nature-filled environment. The aspiration is for the garden to become a focal point for the community—a place for gathering, recreation, and long-term stewardship.

This project followed a series of local initiatives, including street planters, pop-up gardens, green infrastructure, and artist murals and installations.

The overarching aim is to radically improve the use of public space for walking, cycling, and recreation, while also supporting the local daytime and night-time economies by making the area safer and more attractive.

Design Trends Reflected in the Garden

The garden embraced several current and emerging trends in urban garden design:

• Planting into brick and rubble substrates to reflect poor soil conditions and encourage resilient, low-maintenance plantings.
• Naturalistic planting schemes that supported wildlife and human wellbeing.
• Pollution-filtering plants such as hedging, trees, and shrubs were chosen to suit urban environments and reduce air pollution.
• Gabion seating structures provided shelter and habitat while being artfully designed and robust enough for public use.

Relocation and Community Celebration

After the RHS Malvern Show, the garden was relocated to Maindee, Newport. A public garden opening and celebration took place at the end of May, marking the beginning of its life as a permanent community space.

Sustainability Features

The garden was designed with sustainability at its core:

• A balanced proportion of planting to hard landscaping was used, with natural gravel pathways replacing concrete.
• Plants were displayed in rubble mulch to reduce long-term watering needs.
• A sculptural planter destined for Wharf Road functioned as an infiltration planter, connected to a downpipe to demonstrate stormwater management techniques.

Eco-Friendly Building Methods

To minimise environmental impact, the garden:

• Used natural self-binding gravels, stone, and rubble substrates instead of topsoil.
• Omitted concrete entirely, replacing it with geo grids for seating bases and screw piling for the feature wall.

Environmental Responsibility

The garden transformed a neglected, litter-prone corner plot into a vibrant green space. It captured imaginations and encouraged residents to reimagine similar spaces in their own neighbourhoods.

In a high-density urban area with elevated pollution levels, the garden responded with pollution-filtering trees and plants. This aligned with wider local strategies, including the installation of a “clean air” garden at the library and SuDS planters linked to downpipes.

Sustainable Water Management

The gardenpromoted:

• Environmentally sensitive hard landscaping
• Resilient, drought-tolerant planting
• Gravel and rock gardens with mulching
• SuDS (Sustainable Drainage Systems)
• Rain and grey-water harvesting and reuse

Planting Scheme and Key Species

Approximately 2,000 individual plants, including bulbs, were featured in the garden. The layered planting scheme provided seasonal interest through colour and structure.

Five key plants included:

1. Taxus baccata (English yew) – slow-growing, pollution-filtering, and wildlife-friendly.
2. Acer palmatum ‘Globosum’ – a “Streetwise Tree” developed for urban spaces.
3. Cotoneaster franchetii – excellent for pollution absorption and biodiversity.
4. Anemanthele (pheasant’s tail grass) – long seasonal interest and low maintenance.
5. Allium siculum (Sicilian honey garlic) – spring bulbs offering colour and early pollen.

Anchor plants such as Euphorbia and Hylotelephium provided long-lasting shape and colour.

Unsung Plant Heroes

• Yew: Traditionally associated with formal gardens, it was used here for structure, pollution filtering, and wildlife habitat.
• Cotoneaster: Often overlooked, it was celebrated for its versatility, berries, and suitability for sun or shade.

Plant Suppliers

• Hillier: Collaborated with Newport City Council and provided trees tailored for urban environments.
• Wyevale Garden Centre: A local supplier to the show.
• Hortus Loci: Known for peat-free practices and a wide selection of resilient and lesser-known varieties.

Plant lists are provided by the designer of the garden as a guide to the plants they hope to use in the garden based on the time of year, the location and the client brief. The plants that feature at the Show depends on a variety of factors such as weather during the growing season and availability. While the designers try to update lists where possible, the accuracy of the list cannot be guaranteed.

About the designers

Emily Crowley-Wroe creates naturalistic gardens for homeowners in the Cotswolds where she grew up and now lives. Her design studio, April House Garden Design, is based in Bourton-on-the-Water, where she works on a wide range of projects from small courtyard gardens to larger countryside gardens.

Since graduating from the Cotswold Gardening School in 2020 Emily dived into the world of Show Gardens, including The Hide Garden, which received RHS Silver-gilt medal and Best Show Garden in 2022, and HomeAway Garden, which also was awarded RHS Silver-gilt in 2023 at RHS Malvern Spring Festival.

Emily is a keen gardener and allotment owner and spends as much time as possible experimenting with growing flowers and vegetables from seed, and testing plant combinations at home.

What are the advantages of designing a garden at the show?

Emily says, “I wanted to create a garden for a charitable organisation. I came across the Nature Neighbourhoods project and through them met the team in Maindee and visited their Greening Maindee projects. It’s a challenging brief and a difficult environment, but an opportunity to support and publicise the fantastic work they do to improve grey urban environments and bring nature into the city.”