Chiswick Flower market volunteers replant flower beds at Old Market Place

Image above: Planting plan for the newsly redesigned flower beds at Old Market Place

Volunteers from Chiswick Flower Market, alongside Hounslow Highways managers and contractors PGSD, have dug out the flower beds at Old Market Place and given them a makeover.

The beds are usually maintained by Hounslow Highways, but their contract with Hounslow Council only allows a restricted budget to replant what’s already there. Chiswick Flower Market, established in 2020 as a not-for-profit Community Interest Group, wanted to upgrade the beds so they became a showpiece in the centre of Chiswick.

When the Chiswick Flower Market was set up, its aim was to improve the High Rd and attract people to come and spend time and money here. This is the group’s first investment of the funds raised from running the market.

Image above: Newly replanted beds

They employed garden designer Jutta Wagner to design a planting scheme which would provide all year round interest and spent £3,000, replacing the soil and everything in the beds except for the mature trees.

Jutta has also designed the perennial bed at the piazza on Turnham Green Terrace beside the railway embankment and worked on the Kitchen Garden at Chiswick House. The planting scheme she’s used include big structural plants: Hydrangeas, Phormiums and Sweet Box; ornamental grasses and Hebes and 3,000 bulbs which will provide spring and summer interest.

The Chiswick Flower Market, the first new flower market in London for 150 years, is consciously harking back to Chiswick’s horticultural history. Chiswick was home to the most important gardens in the country in Victorian times, as the Horticultural Society had its gardens here, where nurserymen tended new species being brought back by plant hunters from all round the world.

Image above: Newly replanted beds

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See also: Chiswick Flower Market

See also: Chiswick Garden ‘most important in UK’

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