Charlotte Harris – MEET THE MAKER
In the third instalment of our new series: Meet the Makers – where we talk to women inspired by botanicals – we chat Chelsea Flower Show and the importance of women in the botanical world with the gold medal winner, Charlotte Harris.
Today I met the hugely inspiring designer, Charlotte Harris at Chelsea Flower Show where she was glowing with excitement from her award-winning show garden, gloriously, growing around her. Doesn’t it look wonderful?
After spending a little under a year preparing the design: sketching, choosing trees, flowers, boulders, watering moss until the early hours – the list goes on – Charlotte put together her award-winning garden and is now a proud owner of a Chelsea gold medal – deservedly so!
After working with Hugo Bugg (the youngest garden designer to achieve a gold medal at Chelsea 2016) Charlotte applied to create her very own garden with The Royal Bank of Canada, looking to celebrate water not as a commodity but as an entity sacred to humankind!
With her women only design team Charlotte took on the big boys by designing a garden that broke down the structured barriers of Chelsea, which feels organic, natural and familiar.
Charlotte who describes herself as, “quite the perfectionist”, travelled to the boreal forest, carrying as many notebooks as she could squish into her luggage and picked up a canoe in Canada with various guides to discover the vast landscape.
With the help of Julia Feix, Daisy Parsons and Alys Fowler, Charlotte didn’t want to “just recreate the boreal forest”, she wanted to create her own interpretation. In doing so, she had to really, “trust her instincts [to] create a space of beautiful imperfection, to highlight the precious need for nature”, says Charlotte.
In a little botanical scoop, Charlotte has just announced she is joining forces with Hugo Bugg – I can’t wait to see what this design-duo have up their sleeves!
Charlotte is such an inspiration to me and I applaud her and her women-only team for all the hard work, determination and focus to create this botanical masterpiece. WELL DONE!
Signing off, I wanted to share the piece of advice Charlotte gave me, ‘always have faith in yourself and remember to take risks! YES!! I couldn’t agree more!
For your daily botanical inspiration follow @Charloharris – Ooooh… and she is looking for her next Chelsea 2019 sponsor – any takers?