RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2025
The Subaru Cocoon
Mike McMahon Studio’s Subaru Cocoon has made RHS history—becoming the first garden at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival to receive five major awards:
RHS Gold Medal
Tudor Rose Award
Best Show Garden
Best Construction
Environmental Innovation Award.
The Tudor Rose Award—the festival’s highest honour—is not given annually, reserved only for gardens of exceptional calibre. Its award this year marks a landmark moment in contemporary garden-making and recognises The Subaru Cocoon's outstanding contribution to the field.
Commissioned by Subaru UK, the garden reimagines the traditional walled garden as a sensory sanctuary of stillness and transformation. A sculptural perforated brick wall—referencing the jali traditions of South Indian architecture—filters views into a richly planted interior, evoking the vanishing temperate rainforests of Britain and Ireland. Visitors enter through a reflective water threshold, symbolic of cleansing and crossing into an inner world.
With emphatic thanks to our sponsor and suppliers:
Sponsor: Subaru UK and Ireland
Contractor: Big Fish Landscapes
Furniture: Mike McMahon Studio
Plants: Kelways Plants
Trees: Provender Nurseries
Bricks: Kenoteq
Planting List:
Lonicera periclymenum
Asplenium scolopendrium
Asplenium trichomanes
Athyrium filix-femina
Blechnum spicant
Dryopteris affinis
Dryopteris filix-mas
Osmunda regalis
Polypodium vulgare
Polystichum aculeatum
Polystichum setiferum
Centaurea nigra
Convallaria majalis
Digitalis purpurea
Digitalis purpurea alba
Eupatorium cannabinum
Euphorbia amygdaloides
Galium odoratum
Lysimachia nummularia
Lysimachia nemorum
Oxalis acetosella
Saxifraga hirsuta
Succisa pratensis
A Model for Sustainable Garden Design
The garden’s fifth accolade, the Environmental Innovation Award, highlights its pioneering use of sustainable materials and low-carbon construction methods. The perforated wall is built from Kenoteq’s K-Briq—a brick composed of 95% recycled construction waste and recycled pigments. Compressed rather than fired, it has a carbon footprint of under 10% of traditional clay brick. The table and two sculptural chairs were designed and built by Mike McMahon Studio are crafted from Richlite, are made from layers of recycled paper, merging sustainability with refined form.
Judges praised the garden as “radical in its stillness, rigorous in its detail, and profoundly moving”—a space where architecture, ecology and emotion coalesce.
Following the festival, The Subaru Cocoon will undergo a sensitive redesign before being permanently relocated to Horatio’s Garden, where it will serve as a therapeutic space for people with spinal injuries.
