Going for gold at London's Olympic Park Gardens

There's a treat in store for keen gardeners going to Olympic events at Stratford. Half a mile of riverbank between the aquatics centre and the stadium has been cleared of contamination, rubbish, railway sidings and Japanese knotweed and transformed into a garden celebrating the British love of plants. The design is the work of Chelsea gold medal winner Sarah Price.

“I really wanted to celebrate the introduction of plants into Great Britain in the last 500 years so it’s a timeline looking at plants that have come from Europe, then North America, the Southern hemisphere and Asia,” she says. “It’s densely planted, a bit like a meadow, and the plants are intermingled. There are also areas where it’s a simple composition with grasses against this mad tapestry. Part of our brief… was to create gardens suitable for a festival and colourful so it is about making sweeping statements. But it also has unity and relates to painted pictures. We wanted bold swathes of purple in a broad sweep.”

The gardens cover an area the size of 10 football fields, and contain more than 120,000 plants from 250 different species, nurtured to flower during the Olympics They will gradually move in colour from predominantly yellow (left), blue and silver in July to gold in August.

When I visited on June 14, (before a special BBC Radio 4 Gardeners’ Question Time programme), most of the flowers were still to emerge, but the thought that had gone into the planting was obvious. The Lea Valley is a windtunnel, so vegetation has been kept low, with box hedging providing some shelter (left). Grasses were bending in the wind, while spikes of allium, agapanthus, black iris, lillies, red hot poker, and Californian poppy added drama.

Working with Sarah on the wildflower meadows are Professor James Hitchmough and his colleague Nigel Dunnett from the University of Sheffield, and head gardener Des Smith. Professor Hitchmough makes the point that the days when local authorities had money for intensive garden maintenance are past. So the care of the meadow gardens is squeezed into a couple of weeks from the end of February, when the vegetation is cut down and flash-burnt to get rid of weeds, then reseeded with a special prairie mix. He says they trialled this in Sheffield Botanic Gardens in 2004, and today it's still more or less weed-free.

In a more sheltered area near the stadium is the Great British Garden, the work of RHS competition-winners Rachel Read and schoolgirl Hannah Clegg. Their design features Bronze, Silver and Gold areas with matching colours of wildflowers and grasses, running-track inspired spiral paths, a living tunnel of woven willow, an orchard, fruiting hedges and a frog pond with wetland plants. There’s also a 'de Coubertin oak', from an acorn collected from the tree that Baron Pierre De Coubertin planted in 1894 to thank the citizens of Much Wenlock in Shropshire for inspiring the founding of the modern Olympic Games.

In years to come, this former industrial site will become a leafy oasis. Two and a half thousand trees, including alder, cherry, ash, hazel, willow, oak, poplar, rowan, lime, field maple, sweet gum and silver birch have already been planted and a similar number will be added next year.

One thoughtful touch: the parklands will have 250 benches and more than 3,300 seats, so there should always be a handy place to sit and enjoy the surroundings.

Planting notes on the world gardens:

Europe includes:

Crocus; Daffodil; Primrose; Mont Blanc, Drumstick and Bulgarian Onion; Woodruff; Milky Bellflower; Corn Flower; ‘Mayflower’ Geranium; Marsh Spurge; Shasta Daisy; Jerusalem Cross; Loosestrife; Turkish Sage; Devils Bit Scabious; Globeflower; Yellow Oxeye.

America includes:

Evening Primrose; Wild Quinine; Wild Petunia; Butterfly Milkweed; Prairie Daisies, Asters, grasses and Coneflower; Bush’s Poppy Mallow; Tickseed; Rattlesnake Master; Prairie Smoke; Indian Physic; Tall Blazing Star; Jacob’s Ladder; Compass Plant; Soapweed Yucca; Verbena.

Asia includes:

Black Iris; Japanese Anemone; Korean Feather Reed Grass; Tiger, Foxtail, Red and Tall Boy Plantain Lily; Japanese Flamingo and Silverfeather Grass; Moorhexe and Transparent Moor Grass; Giant Fleeceflower; Oriental Burnet; Firetail Bistort.

The Southern Hemisphere includes:

African, Bugle and Pineapple Lily; South African Thistle; Orange New Zealand Sedge; Kangaroo Grass; Angel’s Fishing Rods; Weeping Love Grass; Cape Hyacinth; Ruby Butterfly Gladiolus; Everlasting Golden Strawflower; Red Hot Poker; Drakensburg Tritonia.
More at: http://www.london2012.com/spectators/venues/olympic-park/