Recently the workshop has been busy creating a series of Portland stone sculptures for RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, which opens to the public on 1st July 2025. This project is a collaboration with Stark Strand Garden Design who created the concept and asked me to work on the stone pieces for this ‘pocket garden’.

Here are Sam Stark and Laura Strand

The Green The Gap Garden

“As cities grow, the Teucer Wilson Green the Gap Garden explores how nature can thrive in overlooked spaces – the gaps between the hard landscape, the neglected corners, verges, and forgotten edges. The Portland Stone sculptures are made from off-cuts and un-loved material, provided by Albion Stone and sculpted by Teucer Wilson. Carved with recesses that reflect architectural detailing, they echo the forms and surfaces of the built environment and speak to the urban fabric surrounding these hidden opportunities. 

Recycled aggregate from a demolished workshop is used as a mulch, creating an environment that provides opportunities for plants that thrive in challenging conditions. The planting has been carefully selected for species that are drought-tolerant and able to grow in impoverished soils, reflecting nature’s ability to adapt and endure. The garden demonstrates the potential of these forgotten spaces – where plants push through concrete rubble, claiming ground and bringing life. The planting design softens the rigidity and structure of the architectural forms, blurring the boundary between built and natural environments. Designed to be low maintenance, it supports pollinators and wildlife, while reinforcing the urgent message: to green the gaps is to reimagine our cities as places where nature is welcomed.”

The Plants –

The planting reflects resilience, featuring climate-adaptive, drought-tolerant species that, once established, require minimal irrigation and low maintenance. This considered approach ensures a garden that is not only beautiful but also enduring and sustainable.

A subtle and considered palette with pops of orange and yellow aims to bring vibrancy and energy – uplifting colours that enliven the urban space. These are harmonised and contrasted with soft greens, silvers, and smoky purple foliage, creating a balance between the bold and the delicate. Key plants: Reseda luteola, Cupressus sempervirens, Stipa tenuissima, Seseli gracile and Bulbine frutescens.

Sponsoring the Garden

I was asked to sponsor this garden, and my contribution to the project is creating the sculptures, helping with installation, accommodation, vehicle hire and labour costs. This is quite a commitment for a small business like mine so I wanted to find ways to keep the cost down where possible………

The Stone – ALBION STONE

We were keen to use a pale limestone for the architectural ‘city’ elements in the design and I immediately thought about using Portland stone. I learned masonry in Weymouth, which is ‘a stone’s throw’ from Portland, which provided the local stone we all learned to shape at college. Incidentally, the inhabitants of the Isle of Portland are known as the ‘The Slingers’, I remember my old tutors saying it was because when Weymouth folk used to cross the shingle bank to steal their jobs, the locals hurled stones at them to fend them off.

Portland stone is a lovely material, perfect for masonry, architectural carving and memorial work being a relatively hard limestone (unless you’re from Kilkenny, right?). We were keen to focus on recycling materials (for example using recycled crushed concrete as a mulch) and keeping our carbon footprint down, as well as cost. I approached Albion Stone to ask if we could have a look around the yard and see if there were any stones that had been put to one side for one reason or another, that could be repurposed. Michael Poultney MD of Albion Stone, generously agreed to let us visit the yard and see what we could ‘rescue’. He kindly offered to donate all the material we needed for our garden and to become our second sponsor. We are so grateful for his support and that of Tony Booker who waded through the mud with us marking stones up, and brought us coffee.

Sam was loving the hi-vis. We managed to select about 25 pieces of stone to work with. This project would not have been possible financially without this superb donation from Albion Stone. We would have had to scale things down considerably.

Within a couple of weeks the delivery came – it was like birthday and Christmas all rolled into one (and I should know, I was born on 25th December).

The next phase was refining the designs, seeing what we could make out of the stones, some of which had ‘vents’ (natural cracks) and all of which needed cleaning up and sawing and dressing. These two were destined to become a water feature and a planter.

I decided we needed to get cracking (not literally) as we had a lot of work ahead of us. Below are a few images showing the making of some of the sculptures. A mix of cutters, grinders, chisels, files, sandpaper and coffees were required, and showers. Dan Dan the right hand man and Mirella, my new apprentice were brilliant as we all took on the challenge.

We referred to minimalist architecture a lot in thinking about the detailing.

We did a rough mock-up near the workshop within the metal edging to gauge the scale and visualise how it may look, but without the planting it’s difficult to get the full effect, we’re really looking forward to seeing the whole garden come together when we build it for the show. Classic spirit level work from Dan Dare here monitoring the pin-point accuracy of Mirella ‘Little Miss Mason’ McGee.

So, the sculptures are all finished now and we’re now at the logistics and schedule planning stage. We have about 2 tonnes of stone and slabs and 800kg of concrete rubble (the mulch) to take to site, and let’s not forget the plants! The sculptures will be for sale at the end of the show, so hopefully some of these will disperse into the wider community and find new homes, and bring a new presence into a different setting.

Why not come along and meet us all at the show? There will be lots of other exciting gardens to see too, we’d love to see you there and tell you all about the concept, the carefully selected plants and the my stone sculptural works. Sam and Laura will be there to discuss any garden design projects you might have.

You can read more about the Hampton Court Garden festival here on the RHS website.

Show times: 1 – 6th July 2025

• Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6.30pm
• Sunday 10am – 5.30pm