Village green: Luxury brand goes gardening

London ? With the Chelsea Flower Show already in full bloom, Louis Vuitton’s Westfield store adds to the greening of the UK capital this week. The luxury brand’s newest London store ? which opened yesterday as part of the shopping centre’s luxury zone, called The Village ? features a ‘mobile urban vegetable patch’ installation by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller.

Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Deller signifies a heightened consumer awareness of the importance of urban outdoor spaces and a huge surge in interest in gardening.

‘A good garden is a work of art in itself, and the British love of gardens extends from the practical allotment to the manicured lawn,’ Deller says. ‘In London we have to appreciate nature wherever we can find it, and my installation will reflect this, combining the strange beauty of the scarecrow with a mobile urban vegetable patch.’

Deller’s patches of green are housed in store and dotted around the Village, and take the form of little pots of earth in transportable bags. The artist has spoken of his desire to collaborate with East London gardeners to celebrate some of their most beautiful transportable gardens and bring them to Westfield.