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This garden is designed to be a stylish retreat - a place in which to relax away from the pressures of city life. The clients in mind for this low maintenance garden are a young professional couple, without children but with a hectic lifestyle, who want a beautiful space in which to unwind and relax. The style and colours employed reflect the couple's taste and lifestyle.
The garden contains unusual plants, with an emphasis on scent and texture. It takes advantage of a sheltered microclimate. The planting complements the colour of the fence, which has been painted a pale blue/green - a similar shade to the Japanese pebbles, which contrast with the dark green slate chippings and purple screens and path edging.
The seat and retractable canopy offer the couple an area in which to sit, surrounded by scented plants and with a view into the different areas of the garden. As well as being low maintenance, the garden is designed to give year-round interest with a variety of evergreen planting and features such as the screens, sculpture and pool.

The theme for the competition was 'New Frontiers', and Anna chose to interpret this as new frontiers in science & medicine, using the DNA double helix as a central theme. This was echoed in the layout of the paving, the central sculptural feature and in the supports for climbing plants. Researching the potential of plants such as Taxus as anti-cancer drugs follows a long line through the centuries of using natural products, uncontaminated by chemicals. This organic approach is reflected in the forms used in the garden and also in the materials. Many of the plants used have, now or historically, medicinal qualities.

Each garden was 7.5m wide by 3.5m deep. The finalists were allowed a budget of £1000 and just 4 days to construct their designs. The hard landscaping was supplied by a local firm, Bannold Supplies of Cambridgeshire.

*The Great Garden Challenge - Channel 4, 2005*

Anna & Mike Kentzer's garden design was selected from a nationwide shortlist of garden designs and finally short-listed to appear on the programme. The competition took place at Blenheim Palace gardens from March to July, but Anna & Mike had just 3 days to construct the entire garden.


Detail of one of the corner's of the garden showing the rusted steel 'trellis' and the slate poles set against the complementary planting of Phormium 'Bronze Baby' and Carex 'Milk Chocolate'		Anna and Mike with James Alexander Sinclair (tv presenter and garden designer) at the announcement of the results of the Great Garden Challenge.


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