Chelsea Flower Show

Let’s face it, pretty much every garden at Chelsea is a mountain of achievement. Snowdrops that flower in May, mature trees springing up overnight and every plant in the peak of condition. More extraordinary still, it’s all gone in a fortnight. Not a place that you’d expect to find the team from Triskele Conservation, who rarely find themselves working on anything that’s not been standing for at least a hundred years. But this year, for Jiae Hwang’s garden, A letter from a million years past, we made an exception. At the heart of this medicinal mountain garden is a 5m tall herb drying tower. Constructed using the traditional techniques of the mountainous part of Korea’s Jirisan region, from rock, timber and earth. With thousand of visitors passing through the garden it was important to make sure this rapidly erected structure would cope. The chance to play in the mud and get hands on involvement in such an ancient building technique was too tempting to resist. Triskele Conservation’s, Conor Meehan, found himself up to his elbows in mud as he turned from structural engineer into mud and wattler.