Lichen Garden Antiques has spent the last year working with Cleve West on his contemporary Paradise Garden for sponsors M&G at Chelsea Flower Show, which received one of six sought after gold medals.
 
Chelsea 2014 will be Lichen's fourth involvement with a Chelsea show garden, having previously supplied garden ornaments and reclaimed materials for the Daily Telegraph, Brewin Dolphin and Laurent Perrier gardens. All have won gold, with two winning the coveted Best in Show accolade.
 
The company is supplying all of the paving and walling for the M&G garden, along with the octagonal limestone fountain, designed by Cleve. Lichen has also supplied the stone for the stunning Tree of Life which Cleve has carved by hand and which will dominate the garden design. Cleve West has previously won four gold medals at Chelsea.
 
Behind the fountain, flanked by yew hedging, is the vast, five-panel limestone relief depicting the Tree of Life with carved roots that reach out to the planting and which represent the roots of many gardens throughout the world.
 
Planning for the garden started back in July last year and the stone took several months to cut and prepare during the downpours at the start of this year. The garden will be the culmination of all those months of hard work. "It's great to be working with Cleve again this year", comments Lichen Garden Antiques managing director Darren Jones. "The most extraordinary amount of planning and design detail goes into every garden we work on. There are literally hundreds of emails and phone calls going over the smallest details to create perfection and we are incredibly proud of the result."
 
It takes two artic lorries to transport everything to site and the contractors have just three weeks to build it and plant all of the hedging and plants. Then, when it's all over, they have a few days to pack up and leave the site in the grounds of the Royal Hospital immaculate. All of the hard landscaping is then returned to Lichen's base in Gloucestershire from where it will be sold.