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Gateway Garden — Maindee & RHS Malvern
I worked with garden designer Emily Crowley-Wroe to connect a painted landscape with real planting. The project brought together a permanent mural in Maindee and a separate panel mural for the RHS Malvern show garden, which was always intended to come back to the community afterwards.
Location: Maindee, Newport / RHS Malvern Spring Festival
Client: Maindee Unlimited
Garden designer: Emily Crowley-Wroe, April House
My role: Mural artist / collaborative design
Permanent mural: approximately 7 × 10 metres
RHS mural: approximately 14 × 2.4 metres
Follow the garden from the mural to Malvern and back ↓
The commission
Maindee Unlimited brought me in as mural artist to work alongside garden designer Emily Crowley-Wroe, of April House. Emily was building a show garden — the Maindee Unlimited: Greening Maindee Gateway Garden — for a neglected corner of Maindee, with the whole thing designed to be lifted afterwards and replanted in the community. The shape of it came from two of Maindee’s Art Deco buildings, the old swimming pool and the cinema.
How the design developed
My job was the mural that sat behind it. I spent time with Emily going through her planting and species, and the design changed as we talked. It started as a trompe l’oeil idea and turned into something else entirely — a swirling world built from equirectangular photography, a sphere at the centre pulling you close into the planting, ringed by the flowers we’d discussed. The useful part of that process was not sticking to a fixed mural brief, but letting the planting, architecture and painted image develop together. The final design only made sense because it emerged from that collaboration.
Maindee and Malvern
The garden went to RHS Malvern Spring Festival in May 2025 and won Silver, with sustainability built into it — drought-tolerant planting, donated materials, gravel and rubble mulch instead of concrete. I painted a companion version of the mural on panels for the show, weaving in scenes of urban Maindee to give the garden its context. Then the whole garden was dug up and brought home, replanted on its corner in Maindee in front of the mural it had been designed alongside. The panel version found a home at Resiclo, the community wood recycling social enterprise who’d also built the garden’s circular bench. Sue from Gardeners’ World came to the launch. Now you can stand in front of it and photograph straight through the real planting into the painted world behind.
Further project context
Read the original project story and image gallery ↗ · RHS Malvern: Greening Maindee Gateway Garden ↗ · April House ↗
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