David Taylor catches up with Partner and Landscape Lead at HTAJames Lord at the new Queen Elizabeth II Garden in Regent’s Park to get the lowdown on its design, inspirations, lessons for cities coping with climate change, ‘slow gardening’ and feedback so far… 

Hi James. Perhaps you can put into a sentence or two what this project is all about. 

Sure. It's a project to celebrate the life of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and that is the core objective of the project. And it's released a little bit of brownfield land from the Royal Parks Estate, so this is a bit of ground that has never been part of the park. 

It was a store, correct? 

Yes, it was a store yard, and in fact, where we are standing right here would have been a car park, and then there were some office buildings right in front of us. But the majority of the site was covered in greenhouses; it's where they used to grow the plants for Regent's Park. That was all consolidated into Hyde Park in a new purpose-built facility down there, leaving this site redundant, and I think the Royal Parks took quite a while to try and come up with the best use of the site over a number of years. Then they concluded that really the best use for it would be to extend the park into this brownfield site and create a garden to celebrate the life of Queen Elizabeth II. 

You were saying just before I pressed record that feedback has been pretty good so far; you've led nearly 50 tours already yourself? 

Yes, it's been really, really positive, and I think it's been really interesting listening to various different people from different points of view about what they see in the garden, and what they take from it. It's really nice walking around and just quietly earwigging what members of the public are saying – and talking to members of the public as well, not just listening in. From everybody that we've taken around so far, the feedback has been incredibly positive. It's more than just a beautiful garden. It's interesting as well. There are some interesting principles in here. The more that you get to talk to people about those principles, the more people learn, and the more interesting the garden becomes. 

What are those principles? 

So, obviously, primarily, it's a garden to celebrate the life of the Queen, and there's lots in here that does do that; a planting palette that references the Queen, a layout that is symbolic of her life journey, 

i.e. not linear? 

Not linear, exactly, yes. And so, we've got the reference to the Queen in the layout - we've got two main paths that find your way through the garden, then a sequence of sort of secondary gravel paths. But the two main paths - we have the primary one, which snakes its way all the way through the garden. We call that the path of life, because, like any life journey, it's not arrow straight… 

Meandering… 

It meanders, yes, and goes off in directions you don't necessarily expect it to. 

And in what way does that mirror the Queen's life, would you say? 

Well, we think that mirrors the Queen's life as much as it mirrors anybody's personal life journey, which is, you know, the Queen as a woman, as a mother, as a grandmother, as a wife, rather than necessarily representing her reign, which we think is a different path. 

Right.

In this garden, quite literally a different path. So, the path that runs right through the middle there, we refer to that as the path of service, and that is representative of her reign… 

Which is more linear. 

Absolutely - arrow straight, unwavering. 

Because that's a job, that's her duty. 

Exactly, and she was unwavering in her service, and that is manifest there in the middle of the garden. We also referenced at the beginning, that if this is a life journey, this is the beginning of life. We've incorporated water, which is often used to symbolise the beginning of life and birth, and then we go through the journey of life, and there are sort of chapters as you go through. They're all subtly different as you move through the subtle references to the Queen's life. We've got it in the planting as well, so we've consulted very widely. Particularly useful was talking to the gardeners of the Palaces; they gave us a really good insight as to what the Queen enjoyed in gardens, and why she enjoyed gardens. So, we've got lots of plants that were the Queen's favourite - lots of plants that refer to the Queen and their naming and plants that have royalization... 

Bizzy Lizzies? (laughs) 

(laughs) Her favourite was Lily of the Valley, but she was also really fond of magnolia trees, so we've incorporated a number of Magnolia trees; one in the roundel, especially. But also, her appreciation of gardens, but also landscapes. And I think in a way that's what guided us initially towards creating almost a sort of landscape-scale garden. So, the big move here is to create a garden from boundary to boundary, fully planted, and then within that structure we found a way of getting people in and through that garden. So, it's planting first, and then circulation and movement second, and then giving people the opportunity to sit and dwell, just like we are here, and to enjoy some constructed vistas and purposeful views through, in lots of different spots all through the garden. 

How were you commissioned initially? 

We worked during the pandemic, actually, to get onto the Royal Parks’ framework and there's a handful of practices that are on the Royal Parks landscape framework. Part of that was a design assignment, sort of a design approach, but not for this site, interestingly. It was for something down on the lake in Hyde Park on the Serpentine, and then after they had announced the framework, this was launched as a design competition. So, we won a design competition; it's a limited invited design competition in the face of some pretty stiff competition. We were really, really pleased to have won that competition and what we pitched to them was pretty much what you see here. We were in a way half expecting to win the competition on the basis of the design, and then have to start from first principles again, but actually the Royal Parks were very clear. No, that's the garden we want to see. So, it seemed that we had come up with the right answer pretty quickly, and very early on, which was really what I was describing. It's a garden; it's a two-acre site with a little bit of extra meadow at the top, and we wanted to completely fill this place with the kind of colour and vibrancy and energy that the Queen displayed through her reign. 

How did you interface with the Royal Household over this? Was it through the conduit of the Royal Park? Is that how it happened? 

Yes. 

We're visiting on a scorching hot day. I presume your belief is that cities need such spaces very definitely to counter the effects of global warming, or to do a little to do that. How much of that was in your mind when you were producing this? 

Very much so, and very much in the minds of the Royal Parks as well. They set us a pretty stretching brief for the climate challenge, and how the garden could help. It's a small space. We're not suggesting we're going to heal the planet with a garden like this, but some of the principles that we've explored are innovative and could begin to be developed at scale. We talk a lot in the design of the garden about recycling and repurposing the materials, which I can tell you a little bit more about. But I think, as powerful as that is, actually the ideas in the garden are recyclable and repurpose-able. And then we think if we can begin to employ some of these techniques at scale, then it's as much about reducing the effects of climate change, and heat in particular. But really, it's about creating a more resilient place, so that in a way the garden continues to thrive, despite the fact that our climate is getting warmer and warmer, so we can continue enjoying the benefits of having wonderful landscapes, even although landscapes that we would have known in the past might not be able to cope so well in a hotter climate in the future. So, this is really forward facing. It's a garden for the future. 

You reused a lot of material. Talk to me a bit about that? 

Well, those glasshouses that I mentioned filled up a large part of this site - we had developed a strategy prior to demolition. Traditionally, I guess, in a project like this, you would demolish all the greenhouses, dig up all the concrete footings, dig the whole site down to where you need it, and send all of that off to landfill, whereas here we employed a strategy prior to demolition where we would attempt to reuse as much of the material as we possibly could. So, recycling the steel and the aluminium and the glass from the glasshouses, but most significantly we ended up with about 1000 cubic metres of concrete from the slabs that were sitting underneath the greenhouse. It's quite a big pile of concrete. So rather than sending that to landfill and replacing it with topsoil, which would in many ways come from a farmer's field in East Anglia somewhere, in reality it's a bit more recycled than that; topsoil, but we decided to manufacture our own soil, in effect, on site using that concrete as a base material. So, what we've got is a blend of concrete, crushed concrete with a small amount of its subsoil mixed into that, and then an even smaller amount of compost mixed into that. The subsoil was from site, and the compost was from the Royal Parks estate, so everything was hyper local. Then we manufactured that using crushing material on site, and then we blended it together and created our own soil. Almost everything you can see is that concrete medium to about a depth of about 300 millimetres across here, and then pretty straightforwardly we planted into it. 

People can't quite believe that you can crush concrete and then plant into it, and that plants won't turn their toes up, but there are the results in front of you. What we expected, and indeed what we're finding, is that with the plants, you need to be very careful in your specification of what's going in, because the medium is very free-draining and quite alkaline, as you would expect, because it's come from cement. So, we then developed a planting mix, or a sequence of planting mixes that would really suit that soil condition. So, you've got to work from the soil first, and then plants to suit the soil, and then adjusting those planting mixes in order to get the visual effect that you're after. So, the majority of plants in here are actually sourced from Mediterranean region, where you would expect to have limestone-influenced, light, free-draining soil – so almost exactly matching the conditions that we've created – which is a mixture of perennials and sub shrubs and shrubs. We sourced them in very, very small sizes, called ‘P9s’ - nine centimetre pots. The majority of that has been grown in dedicated growing conditions for this project in peat-free compost, because we didn't want to specify huge amounts of peat and destroy another ecosystem while creating our own. 

So, then we planted everything about last November, October, November in 2025, with these very, very small plants. And the reason we're very small is, a), it's more sustainable to source small plants - less transport costs, less need to generate huge amounts of compost to sustain them in; they're in greenhouses, which are heated for less time. So, all of the inputs are much reduced if you purchase smaller plants. But also with that soil mix, it's very nutrient-poor, so the plants that are going into it, if we had put in much bigger plants with big root balls that were well established and probably had lots of peat in them in the mix, and then you threw them into some crushed concrete, they would definitely curl up their toes and say, "No, thank you very much. This is a bit of a shock to the system". 

So, by buying effectively baby plants and planting them, what they're able to do is to establish much deeper and more mature root systems in this planting matrix in this soil. What we anticipated is what we've seen, which is in the first season, plants are dedicating a lot of their energy to putting down these very deep, very wide root systems. They're growing stocky; they're growing into tough little plants, but that means that they are much more resilient to the kind of weather that we're seeing today, and will do over the next few days in our mini heat wave, because they have the root system to support them, rather than a big plant that's been blocked in, doesn't grow any roots, because it's got everything it needs in its little root ball; doesn't send out this amazing network of roots, and therefore can't access the water and the nutrient when it when it needs it most. Whereas in here it's being able to make use of the water that's still sitting in the ground underneath the surface. 

Two questions. Firstly, what was the trickiest challenge design-wise here? And secondly, if that's different, what is your favourite aspect of it? What is your favourite corner of this part in which to sit, stand, contemplate, etc? 

It's really hard to choose a favourite part; it's like the old cliche, choosing a favourite child. (laugh). I think what's really nice about the garden is I enjoy the fact that there is a real variety of experience and spaces. Is that a cop out? 

Yes! I mean, this is very nice. where we're sat in a very, shaded corner. 

It's a really lovely, shaded part and we're by the water; you can enjoy the dragonflies flying around, and then there are different spots, and it's enjoyable in so many different spots for different ways. There are shady spots over there. This bit's really open. It's going to have a stunning perennial display when the plants are fully established, which will take a few years, and we're open about that. This is slow gardening, 

Right. 

The sort of horticultural equivalent of slow food. And actually, I think that has probably been quite challenging to us as landscape architects. Because interestingly, almost every other client we've worked with said, "How do I have it quickly? How does it look amazing on day one? What can we do to open this with a with a bang?" And they mean planting by that. We've quite often ended up adding to planting schemes so that they look absolutely amazing on opening day, and in many ways, this has been the opposite experience. This has been about being patient and being slow, and knowing that you've got time on your side, and that's what's great about working with a client like The Royal Parks. I mean, they've been doing this for a long time. 

They're confident about their long term standing... 

They are confident about their management and their maintenance, and they know that they can take on a really experimental garden like this, and that they will make it a success, which has been a real challenge. We've had to think differently about the way we do things. It's a dream come true in many ways, because you're working with the conditions, you're working with nature, and you've got time on your side. I mean, that's a kind of perfect brief for a landscape architect, but at the same time, you need to stop yourself slipping into the way that you've, in many ways, been conditioned to work, which is: it needs to look amazing on day one. What's it going to look like the day we cut the ribbon? And yes, challenging our own preconceptions on that. But also, I think making sure that we're informing visitors that this is an experimental garden and it's very different from what they might expect to see. We opened it a few weeks before the Chelsea Flower Show, for example, so you see on television those amazing, spectacular, fully established, very mature gardens, and then you come here, and this looks very, very different; small plants in what looks like gravel mulch, but is actually crushed concrete topsoil. So, yes, that's been a challenge. 

Well, it's fantastic. Congratulations. 

Thank you!