Following a serendipitous conversation with a mutual client, Tom Massey FSGLD’s Avanade Intelligent urban forest is now in the final stages of its metamorphosis from RHS Chelsea show garden to public realm space on a unique site in the heart of Manchester.
In a few weeks’ time, the transformation of a small, triangular-shaped traffic island into a welcoming, planted, and climate-resilient pocket park will be complete and what was informally known as Pigeon Triangle will formally become the natural conduit between central Manchester and its newest public park, Mayfield Park.
Trees planted on the outer edges of the site’s two longer sides will act as a living boundary that visually connects with an existing ‘green’ corridor leading to Mayfield Park itself, while the route through the centre of the triangle will be open and accessible, a calm, relaxing place away from the busy surrounding roads. Mounded planting beds to the north and rain gardens to the south will add visual interest and definition to the edges of the site as well as enhance local biodiversity and absorb water run-off during heavy downpours. A little network of narrow paths and stepping stones, meanwhile, will weave through the planting and take visitors to clusters of seating.
The Intelligent Garden, the latest name for this site just south of Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station’s southern exit, is the result of a collaboration between garden designer Tom Massey FSGLD, Je Ahn of Studio Weave, and landscape architect Duncan Paybody, of Studio Egret West, who led the design of Mayfield Park and has been working on the 24-acre Mayfield site since 2019. The teams were commissioned by the Mayfield Partnership to introduce the garden to Mayfield as part of an exciting new threshold development that will see the expansion of the park towards the railway station, and the creation of a new urban quarter – all centred around Mayfield Park.
‘THE GRITTIER AND HARDER THE LOCATION, THE BETTER FOR THE AI EXPERIMENT.’
Among the elements that even now are being installed on the 0.24-acre site are specimen trees, reclaimed concrete slabs and stepping stones, all of which were last seen in May 2025, on Tom and Je’s Avanade Intelligent Garden at RHS Chelsea. The keen-eyed visitor to this new Mancunian garden might notice sensors fixed discreetly to several of the tree trunks. These solar-powered tags monitor factors such as trunk growth (measured in microns) and lean angle, and feed data to an app originally developed by the show garden’s sponsor, digital services company Avanade. Together, they provide support for trees’ health and long-term care, which is particularly important in urban environments, where conditions can be extremely challenging.
‘So many trees planted in cities don’t survive, and that’s a real problem we wanted to highlight through our show garden,’ says Tom. ‘Trees are being specified and planting targets are being met, but if those trees don’t establish and thrive, it becomes a somewhat futile exercise.’
He goes on to explain that when Duncan first showed him round Mayfield Park, he could see the synergy between Studio Egret West’s work and his own in terms of reusing materials, specifying urban trees of all shapes and sizes, not just standards and monocultures, and creating a space that had a sense of urban wildness and connection with nature for its users.
‘At the time, Je and I were looking for a new home for the show garden when Duncan introduced us to Pigeon Triangle. It sits just outside the main park and had no real soil, just gravelly hardstanding and blocks of concrete. But because the show garden was about highlighting the challenges urban trees face, and exploring how sensors and AI might help support their survival, the site felt like a perfect real-world testing ground for that idea.’
Duncan continues: ‘We’d been workshopping ways to transform the journey from the railway station to Mayfield Park for a couple of years and we were a bit nervous of showing Pigeon Triangle to Tom and Je as it wasn’t particularly glamorous, but they said they liked it, as the grittier and harder the location, the better for the AI experiment and the more needed a micro forest would be, so the site worked for all of us.’
While the show garden was conceived as an urban public space, Tom notes that, for judging at Chelsea, it inevitably became a more refined, idealised version. ‘If you incorporated the kind of real-world requirements that Duncan has had to address at Mayfield, such as hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) measures, signage, or the removal of mid-layer planting to maintain clear sightlines, you’d probably be marked down.’
So, rather than relocating the show garden to Manchester, ‘it needed to be a reworking project and a reuse opportunity’, says Duncan, who has led the redesign while Tom and Je have acted as consultants. ‘The design of Mayfield Park really leans into local things and has a very strong reuse narrative,’ Duncan continues, ‘and the Mayfield Partnership board was keen that we maintain that in the Pigeon Triangle space. Also, we had to apply for planning permission for the pocket park, and we had to make the design HVM responsive as the site is designated an HVM protection zone for events within the Mayfield Depot across the road.’
The issue for Duncan was that while the main park had been a rich source of interesting materials and elements suitable for reuse in that space, other than some rather ugly HVM concrete blocks that lined the perimeter of Pigeon Triangle, the new location was a blank canvas. ‘Using elements from Tom’s garden, however, that would be reuse,’ says Duncan, ‘and as some of those pieces were already items that Tom had reused, reusing them in our garden would make it a kind of double reuse, which we thought was really interesting.’
The concrete paving that ran through the middle of Tom and Je’s garden, then, together with some of the boulders that had been used as stepping-stones across the water feature, have been reworked into Duncan’s version of the Intelligent Garden. ‘We’re not recreating the stream because of the challenges of doing that in such a public location,’ he explains. ‘Instead, we’re reinterpreting it with a couple of rain gardens which may occasionally be inundated with water on a really wet day.
‘WE’RE LAYERING IN SITE-SPECIFIC ELEMENTS THAT TIE INTO THE LOCALE AND WE’RE INTRODUCING TO THIS NEW PLACE A STORY ABOUT TRADITIONAL CRAFT AND HERITAGE.’
‘We’re also reusing all the amazing trees and keeping the sensors but because this space is going to have so much pressure from people passing through and around it – people will spill out here from events in the Depot over the road – we’ve had to adjust the proportions of hard and soft materials to cater for that footfall.’
So, where the split between hard and soft materials in Tom and Je’s garden was roughly 85 per cent soft and 15 per cent hard, the split in the new garden is closer to 60:40 and to make up the shortfall of both elements, Duncan and his team have reused pieces found on site: ‘We still have the original HVM concrete blocks and have rearranged them and created what we’ve called a “block” garden, instead of a more traditional rock garden, and that is being planted up with alpines.’
They have also sourced additional materials from local suppliers and that has been eased by their work elsewhere around the site. As part of the planning permission, Studio Egret West is paving the surrounding roads for pedestrians, creating a safe and walkable green gateway to Mayfield Park and including the introduction of a new café and the re-development of the famous Star & Garter pub. For that, Duncan has procured sandstone from a quarry about 40 miles away, in West Yorkshire. ‘While I was there approving the sample, I noticed a pile of off-cuts which were waste from the neat and tidy, compliant paving that was being cut for us. The pieces are riddled with drill marks and holes, evidence of the stonecutter’s craft, rather like the Industrial Revolution-age scars of production work that you can see in some of the walls in the main park, and instead of leaving these off-cuts to be crushed to make aggregate, we’re using them laid on end to create crevice gardens between the concrete blocks.’
The team has also found Victorian sandstone setts beneath the surface of the old roads they are re-paving, and these are being used to make the network of paths in the garden.
‘By reimagining these very robust, ugly elements and combining them with beautiful plants,’ says Duncan, ‘we’re layering in site-specific elements that tie into the locale and we’re introducing to this new place a story about traditional craft and heritage.’
For the softscaping, the trees from the show garden have been in storage with their sensors still in place on their trunks for the last year at Lanes Nursery, near Manchester, waiting to be put into position on Pigeon Triangle. Unsurprisingly, though, Tom’s original plants were gifted to other gardens through the RHS Reuse scheme. ‘The cost of transporting and maintaining the mostly perennial plants for a year would have been prohibitive, particularly when you don’t know exactly when the plants will go into a new location, so it makes more sense to procure new ones when needed,’ he says.
Duncan’s colleague, project landscape architect Tara Hiley, has led the planting design for the Pigeon Triangle site, with Tom providing feedback and advice, and there has been continued collaboration with Mayfield’s gardening team from Ashlea Landscaping, the company that installed and maintains everything in the main Park and which will be doing the same on Pigeon Triangle. ‘The larger shrubs, including blackcurrants, redcurrants and a Sambucus ‘Milk Chocolate’ from the show garden have gone in, and the wider planting palettes include alpines, drought- and flood-tolerant planting, woodland species and soft edging plants,’ says Tom.
‘We did look at Tom’s original list to see if we could replicate it,’ Duncan comments, ‘but we needed the planting to be site specific, particularly for the crevice garden, and year-round; we also wanted to bring in a few references to the planting you see in Mayfield Park so the end result is a combination of all three.’
Quite small plants have been procured (‘our experience with public spaces is that they succeed better in the long term, provided you protect them’, says Duncan), which means that when the dignitaries gather to officially open it as expected in September, the lower layer of the garden will lack the lushness that will come after a growing season or two.
Trees from the show garden include two Sichuan peppers (Zanthoxylum simulans and Z. piperitum) alongside Decaisnea fargesii (with its distinctive, sausage-shaped blue pods), Toona sinensis ‘Flamingo’ (its pink leaves tasting faintly of beef and onion crisps), and Poncirus trifoliata, the Japanese bitter orange. Together with Duncan’s thoughtful reinterpretation of the original design and the development of a narrative rooted in Mancunian craft and heritage, and underpinned by both human and artificial intelligence, these elements will give the garden a strong and immediate presence.
‘Anyone expecting to see Tom’s show garden rebuilt will be disappointed,’ Duncan concludes, ‘but I hope they’ll see that it still captures the overall ethos and that it’s very much a crafted space, crafted through conversations and collaborations.’
WHO’S WHO
- Tom Massey FSGLD, tommassey.co.uk
- Duncan Paybody, studioegretwest.com
- Avanade, avanade.com
- Mayfield Park, mayfieldpark.com
- Lanes & Brentwood Moss Nurseries, laneslandscapes.co.uk
- Ashlea Landscaping, ashlea-landscaping.co.uk
- Landsec, landsec.com
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