GARDENING / How avant-garde can a garden get?: When Chelsea judges snubbed Paul Cooper's exhibit, were they opposing the inevitable? Helen Chappell sees green shoots of radicalism in the conservative world of exterior design

'THE Royal Horticultural Society must be the last establishment in Britain that you can shock,' says garden designer Paul Cooper, unrolling a set of plans on the kitchen table. 'But their perversity is almost a blessing. It may be bad news but it can have a positive effect.' Six weeks after this year's public snubbing of his entry by the judges at the Chelsea Flower Show, Cooper is hardly a broken man. Commissions still flow in from avant-garde clients. This afternoon he is in the kitchen of new clients in Golder's Green in north London, working on their new garden. Glimpsed through the window, the current one is a rectangle of scrubby grass. Wedged into the mock-Tudor semis of this traditional suburb, the house already stands out with its modernist open-plan geometry. The new garden will be equally unconventional - a riot of multi-level planting, viewing galleries, stained glass and rubber paving. None of your mixed borders here.

'I like the idea of being able to change the structure and move things around in the garden, so it is never finished,' says Cooper. 'The idea that a garden has to mature gradually for 20 years is out of date. Nobody lives like that any more.' It was just this heretical attitude that so offended the Chelsea judges. His 'Constructivist Garden' was designed around a 'cool and sexy' theme, involving giant glass panels, a multi-coloured waterfall, a screen projected with the image of a kissing couple, bushes hung with teabags on strings and a ground-level grille blowing jets of air up the skirts of unwary females. The planting scheme, including crescents of black grass and orange marigolds, seemed almost an afterthought. The whole thing was inspired by an article, headlined 'Sex in the Garden', which appeared in XpGar, a new gardening magazine which co-sponsored the exhibit. The Chelsea judges were not amused.

Cooper's garden was awarded no medal of any kind (the last time this happened was back in 1987). His 'Greening of Industry' exhibit, however, won the Fiskar's Sword of Excellence at Chelsea in 1992, despite not being a garden at all in the strict sense. Accusations and counter-accusations about the affair have flown freely in the gardening press over recent weeks, leading some of us to suspect a calculated publicity stunt on the part of Cooper, the RHS, or both.

'Paul Cooper was persuaded by the editor of XpGar to do something outrageous to drum up publicity for the magazine's launch,' claims Stephen Bennett, the RHS Shows Director. 'His design didn't keep to the original brief he submitted and his planting was rubbish.'

Paul Cooper replies: 'I like Steve Bennett; at least he's straight with you. But he was the first to admit that the RHS got an awful lot of publicity out of all this. They need PR at the end of the day.'

The casual Chelsea visitor may feel bemused, amused or simply bored by this storm in a flower pot. But underneath the blustering and hurt pride, there may be the stirrings of a real debate. A groundswell of dissatisfaction among modern-minded garden designers, lecturers and commentators has been gathering momentum for several years, and the recent Chelsea cat-fight has inspired many of them to speak out. TV presenter Liz Rigbey, who trained at Pershore College, made a point of featuring the Cooper garden on the Gardeners' World Chelsea programme, her skirt gamely buffeted by the Marilyn Monroe-style joke fan. 'I'm pleased that he has caused a stir,' she says, 'because a whole new way of thinking is needed in garden design. Perhaps his garden could have been better but at least he displayed some new ideas. Hardly anyone is advancing our view of gardens at the moment. All we do is look back and wallow in nostalgia.'

Designer David Stevens has been complaining about the lack of innovation in landscape design for years. His position as a Chelsea judge this year received an added piquancy when it came to assessing the entry of friend and ex-colleague Cooper. 'Personally, I would have liked to see it recognised,' he admits, 'but the gardening establishment perceives gardens as plants and Paul's garden just didn't have enough of them. It is a flower show after all.' Because Stevens is also a trained plantsman, he feels he is permitted a little more freedom than ex-sculptor Cooper. At this year's RHS Spring Garden Show, for example, he constructed a 35ft-high acrylic pyramid decorated with mirrors and 70,000 tulips as the show centrepiece. But he has also suffered the disapproval of the RHS judges - his 'Vision of Tomorrow' garden (acrylic tents, plasma balls, plastic flooring) received a modest medal in 1991 after he was awarded the Sword of Excellence for two previous entries.

'People have got to try new ideas,' says Stevens, 'but I'm horribly dejected by the British response to them. We should be moving forward, but we're still 50 years behind the times. Too many new gardens are too conventional - technically OK but mediocre. People like John Brookes and I do our best, but I find I am doing all my most modern work in California. I think the whole problem starts with education. Visual art is taught in blinkered little categories, with landscape design stuck in a narrow, dated slot.' Jane Brown, lecturer in 20th-century gardening history for the Inchbald School of Design, sees his point, but feels the problems begin not in the classroom but after her students graduate. 'My student are always asking me: 'Where do we go from here? Where can we see a good modern garden?' and there's just nowhere for them to go. They are bright and original and I see them become absolutely galvanised by the idea of modernism. But as soon as they set up in business, they discover it's the clients who refuse to accept anything new.'

In Jane Brown's view, garden design in this country suffered two serious setbacks this century - the first just before the last war when Bauhaus-inspired landscape designers like Christopher Tunnard left to work in California. Tunnard at least left behind the modernist garden at St Ann's Hill in Chertsey for her deprived students to visit. In the Fifties, a promising new movement was again destroyed, this time by popular indifference. 'A lot of brilliant young architects and landscape designers worked on the Festival of Britain in 1951,' she says, 'but since then they have either lapsed into obscurity or designed gardens abroad.' Except for a few buffs like the Saatchis, she believes, the British are still resistant to modern art and design. In the garden, they prefer revivals of past styles - Gertrude Jekyll-worship and flowery garden rooms with pergolas and trelliswork. 'Chelsea is useless for advancing garden design,' she complains. 'Very few of the judges are professional designers - most of them are plant breeders or nurserymen.'

'Chelsea is a bit like a fashion show,' says Andrew Wilson, Chairman of the Society of Garden Designers. 'You need someone like Paul Cooper to go over the top so that others can follow - like Vivienne Westwood's ideas trickling down to the high street.' The reason why this trickle-down effect is so slow in Britain, he believes, is that there are so few modern gardens reported in the media - gardening press, books and TV - for amateur and professional gardeners to see. 'Amateur gardeners are very important. Whether or not we use a garden designer, we should ask ourselves: 'What is my garden for?' and use it to fit our lifestyles. A garden today can serve almost any purpose. And it doesn't always matter if plants are pushed aside on this plot of land we call our own.'

The conservative camp, however, also has some persuasive arguments up its sleeve. As Stephen Bennett points out, the bulk of dedicated gardeners are still over 40, and many cling to ideas formed decades ago. The Chelsea Flower Show, he believes, is simply a reflection of what most gardeners desire. 'The Cooper Garden was out of place there,' he insists. 'You and I might find bits of it amusing and interesting. But the average Chelsea visitor is a middle-aged lady who is not interested in dangling teabags and pictures of male nudes. There are loads of places in the world where you can go if you want to be titillated in that way. Why at Chelsea, for heaven's sake? Frankly, 99 per cent of the people who saw Paul Cooper's garden either didn't understand it, were thoroughly bored or just turned their noses up.'

Needless to say, Cooper remembers it rather differently. 'The comments we got were many and varied,' he says. 'They ranged from people saying 'It's a mess, I can't stand it, it shouldn't be here', to those saying, 'Thank God for something new'. Most of the show gardens float over people like background music. You hear them murmuring, 'That's nice, that's nice', all the time. I think it's much better to create something that people either love or hate, something graphic or challenging to show you don't always have to be pretty.' The most positive reactions to his work were certainly from those under 40, but the strength of their enthusiasm convinces him that a change of style is inevitable. 'I'm an optimist. I think the tide is turning. I think we're now at the beginning of something very new and different in British gardens.'

More radical ideas do seem to be circulating now among the horticulturally mutinous. Jane Brown is one of those proposing a salon des refuses show as an alternative to Chelsea, offering space to the avant gardeners it now rejects. The now notorious XpGar hopes to provoke more outrage among the slug pellets and mixed borders of suburbia. Cooper has just introduced a course in contemporary garden design at Hereford College of Art - the first of its kind in a British art school. 'We want to open minds and generate new thinking. Garden-making should be seen as an art form rather than a hobby,' he says. 'It was taken seriously in the past.' The modernists and eccentrics may still be beyond the pale among the old guard with their RHS ties and green wellies, but we gardeners - amateur and professional - do seem to be living in interesting times again. Sooner or later, Disgusted of Chelsea may be in for a few more shocks. -

(Photographs omitted)