In this year’s London Olympic Games, one of the most beautiful illustrations of international solidarity is found on the field of the Olympic Park Gardens

Historically & horticulturally, London has a rich history of parks, namely large and extravagant Victorian-era gardens filled with statues, fountains and topiary. While they can be stunning, they are also highly labour intensive and require fastidious maintenance.

Culturally speaking, this kind of garden is no longer fashionable. Gardens are considered more desirable and infinitely more valuable when they have purpose, promote activity, are ecologically sustainable and easily manageable. In this category, the London Olympic Park Garden wins gold.

The design of the gardens is a collaborative project between Professors James Hitchmough, Nigel Dunnett and Sarah Price. Their project conceptually explores four global gardens running in sequence and following a timeline.

The first garden represents Western Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. This garden consists of diverse grasslands, which was the traditional agricultural backbone for centuries. These gardens feature random plantings of bee-friendly wildflowers such as Lythrum ‘Robert’ and blue Succisa pratensis to create a meadow effect. This particular landscape has previously promoted the highest biodiversity of all European ecosystems and has high carbon storage. Unfortunately, it has practically vanished from the contemporary countryside due to modern farming practises.

The second garden represents Temperate Asia. The great Victorian and 20th Century plant collectors greatly enriched British gardens through their adventurous travels to China and Japan, bringing back exotic plants such as the magnificent Tiger Lily (Lilium tigrinum) and the Japanese anemone (Anemone japonica).  The Temperate Asia garden focuses on the herbaceous plants of woodland glade, forest edge and grassland, and has a greater emphasis on texture and foliage.

The third garden represents South Africa. The plants featured in this section of the gardens are resilient African flowers. Primarily, these plants reveal an exposed flowerhead, sticking up on tall, bare stems to make them more obvious to pollinating insects and birds. They are hardy and resilient, surviving in African grassland mountains at altitudes of 3000m, and conditions of extreme hot, cold and dry.

The final garden is the North American prairie garden. In the wild, much of this style of vegetation is now lost, destroyed in the C19th by the implantation of corn fields. Many late summer and autumn flowering herbaceous plants in British gardens are derived from Prairie, including many varieties of Asters. The value of prairie plants for wildlife lies in the late supply of nectar and pollen, at a time when many British native flowers have long ceased flowering.

In the history of Olympic landscaping, many newly created gardens require too much maintenance and do not provide service and value to the environment. The emphasis has been on aesthetics and not ecology, and as a result they have not always been a resounding success. However, London’s newly sustainable and easily manageable concept will hopefully break that record.

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