BALI Yorkshire and North East are collaborating with their members to exhibit their show garden ‘Tea for Two’ at this year’s Harrogate Spring Flower Show, which aims to celebrate two very different traditions and ceremonies surrounding tea. The garden takes inspiration from the very English tradition ‘Afternoon Tea’ and the traditional Japanese tea ceremony and brings them together in an effortless and simplistic manner.
The North of England Horticultural Society was founded in 1911, but its activities were soon suspended with the onset of the First World War. Revived in 1921, it wasn’t long before the society concentrated all its efforts on staging two flower shows each year, with the first held at Harrogate’s Valley Gardens in 1934.
It was around this time (1939) that inspirational garden designer Mirei Shigemori was invited to design the four gardens at the Tofuku-Ji Temple in Kyoto - his first major project. Within these gardens, Shigemori blended traditional Japanese garden design with more Western and contemporary concepts, with the exploration of the Western avant-garde and Japanese pre-modern culture playing equally large roles in Shigemori’s designs.
The BALI’s ‘Tea for Two’ garden derives certain aspects from the Tofuku-Ji Temple gardens; particularly the stone aspects from the North garden, with its cubism and surrealism in the use of stone. The stones consist of square cubes, creating a checker pattern, as well as round stone pillars which replaced naturally shaped stone.
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