Mbombela – Celebrated South African landscape gardener Leon Kluge took the Best in Show for landscape at the Philadelphia Flower Show in the US, the world’s largest indoor flower exhibition. It ends on Sunday.
The Mbombela-based “artist gardener” also picked up a gold and silver award in the landscape section, as well as the Governor’s Trophy for Innovative/Unique Design, at the awards ceremony held last Friday.
His Twitter feed has since been alight with congratulations, and on the nigh, he tweeted: “Lots of bling!!! And just enjoying the moment! Amazing!”
Kluge, 35, is the first South African landscape artist to have been invited to this major event, which this year had the theme “Celebrate Movies”. He elected to use Walt Disney’s Maleficent as inspiration, and titled his garden “A Maleficent View”.
Every garden was magical, interpreting Disney and Disney*Pixar movies from Cars and Frozen to Cinderella, but Kluge’s stole the show, with its curving wooden sculptures melding with a rosette-shaped pond and surrounded by subtle flowers, grass and trees.
In a video uploaded to YouTube, Kluge explains that he chose Maleficent because of the beautiful garden featured in the movie.
“It’s all organic, with wood from trees in the area morphing into an outdoor living space. Water is very important in the movie. There’s a lot of reflection, as a lot of the story happens in the rivers and ponds,” he says.
As to the garden, he used “soft and happy” foxgloves, a “big contingency of grass” and bulbs, in mainly whites, mauves and blues. He also used pebbles, sand, and carved-out seed heads to use as lights. “And the trees took me forever to get. I came in October and went through thousands of orchards of trees to find five ‘protectors of the forest’ like in the movie,” he says.
Kluge faced stiff competition. Internationally acclaimed landscape designers competing included America’s Joe Palimeno and Michael Petrie, who have been honoured at competitions around the world, as well as Jim Fogarty of Australia, Paul Hervey-Brookes of the UK and Lim In Chong of Malaysia.
In an interview with Verve in 2013, after he’d won gold in the home garden section of the Gardening World Cup 2013 in Japan, as well as the Best on Show prize, Kluge said gardening was all he has ever wanted to do. “I love plants… and gardening is an art to me,” he said.
He has excelled in numerous international garden shows, including the renowned Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show, and after he disassembles his award-winning garden in Philadelphia, he and his team are headed for the Festival des Jardins in Chaumont, France, taking place next month, where he will again showcase his talents.
Helen Grange, The Star