Chelsea - Flower Show 2013 (London)

This was not really a discovery as such but Veronica from Applied Landscape Design wrote to say that a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2013 was to showcase the flora of Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests of California. Veronica and her collegue Kym were the designers of the garden "A Lasting Legacy" on behalf of the Garden Club of America, who are celebrating their 100th anniversary this year. Veronica originally wrote to us back in January and after investigating a few of our suggestions for stump samples she was finally able to secure some pieces of Coast Redwood from The Royal Forestry Society's Redwood Grove at Leighton in Powys.

The garden won a Silver-gilt medal. There is an excellent book called "The Wild Trees" that describes the mini eco systems that exist in the canopies of the Coast Redwood trees, along the huge branches and trunk hollows hundreds of feet high in the forests. It is actually the story about the exploits of a group of climbers that specialise in the tallest Redwood trees and they describe their tree top findings in detail. It is written by Richard Preston