Bespoke Planters for Chelsea

When Ann – Marie Powell was looking for bespoke planter solutions for the prestigious RHS show garden this year, Livingreen Design was the natural choice. The company has many years of experience of working with Garden Designers and landscape architects to take their wish lists and turn them into fully fledged products of outstanding quality.

This year the challenge was to come up with a novel seating planter to contain the Pledge Trees for the Greening Grey Britain campaign, where visitors hang a pledge token on the tree promising to green up a grey space. Situated in the gardens main walk through route, the planters needed to be not only beautiful to look at but also highly functional and resilient as the seats ended up doubling as platforms for visitors to stand on in order to hang their pledges on the highest branch!

Taking a visualisation from Ann-Marie, Livingreen Designs in house product designers, came up with a solution that utilised some existing mouldings in conjunction with bespoke elements to create an upside down baseball cap look for a fraction of the cost that all new tooling would have been. The planters proved a huge hit and the company has received many enquiries for identical bench planters for use on both private and commercial schemes.

Also used on the garden were many of the standard Livingreen Design planter ranges painted in vibrant colours to show how easily a grey space can be transformed at minimal cost.

Livingreen Design were also proud to have been chosen to provide the planters for the RHS’s birthday present to the Her Majesty the Queen. These were 4 specially selected trees, one for each of her estates and were presented, planted in our famous ‘Blob’ planters, an in house Design that is sold throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Away from the RHS’s own garden, Livingreen manufactured part of the bespoke water feature on the Winton Beauty of Mathematics Garden but was instrumental in saving another garden from disaster after another supplier let them down with only 4 weeks to go until show time.

Designer Lee Bestall was facing the unthinkable, literally no garden, when the freestanding curved planter beds that comprised the whole design could not be made by the metal manufacturer he had been counting on for the build. Through his contacts, Lee was put in touch with Livingreen Design as the one company that might be able to get the job done in time.

Building The Sir Simon Milton Foundation Urban Connections Garden in three weeks was one of the toughest challenges Livingreen had ever faced. There were 16 separate beds to make, each one featuring not only curved sides but also undulating sides and all of them had to fit together into a complex geometric shape. Some of the individual planters were 3.5m long and nearly 2.4m wide. The last curve ball was the planters had to be all CLASS 1 fire retardant, It was a mammoth task, particularly as full production drawings had to be produced by our in house CAD team prior to production starting.

As the company’s production book was completely full, the whole job could only be done by putting on night and weekend shifts and counting on the goodwill of the production team to get the job done. As always they rose to the challenge, working in conjunction with a team of 6 joiners and jumping on to fibreglass laminate the moulds they were producing as soon as they became available.

Despite the difficulties, the job was completed on time and dispatched to Chelsea for a delighted Lee Bestall. You can imagine how concerned he was about getting this all on time, He said ‘ you always make me feel better when I speak to you, you always say just what I want to hear’ This was because Lee was provided with photographs and updates at every stage for his own peace of mind. He was delighted to see the dedicated truck roll into the show ground.

Livingreen Design are the largest specialist fibreglass planter manufacturer in the UK with a huge and market leading range of planters, planter furniture and Greenwall solutions, suitable for both interior and exterior use. The company specialise in bespoke work and supply commercial projects throughout the UK and Europe. Due to the lightweight nature of fibreglass (GRP) Roof garden solutions are a particular expertise, however, projects of all types and sizes are undertaken. Please visit the website www.livingreendesign.com for full information and the latest catalogue.

Email: enquire@livingreendesign.com

Tel: 0131 440 9804

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