Designer: Callum Corrie
Event: BBC Gardeners World Live 2025 (The NEC, Birmingham)
Project Scope: Bespoke LEGO-Shaped Metal Sand Wall & 2 Small Niche Bee Posts
The Brief
When award-winning designer Callum Corrie approached us for his feature garden at BBC Gardeners World Live 2025, we knew this project was going to be something special. Callum’s vision was a highly playful, creative LEGO-themed garden that proved a space could be bursting with vibrant color, intricate detail, and striking structure, while still putting nature-based solutions at its very core.
Our challenge was to collaborate with Callum to design and manufacture bespoke, functional habitat that fit seamlessly into this highly stylized, geometric aesthetic.
The Niche Solution: Bespoke Engineering for Nature
To bring Callum's vision to life, we looked beyond standard ecological interventions and engineered a completely custom feature piece, alongside our trusted core products:
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The LEGO-Shaped Sand Wall: A large portion of solitary bees and solitary wasps require bare, free-draining sand to excavate their nests. To accommodate them in this unique setting, we adapted the signature artwork from our commercial sand planter range. We designed and supplied custom, LEGO-shaped metalwork to clad a vertical wall structure. This bespoke metal facade successfully retained the specialized sand substrate behind it while providing an easily accessible, vertical nesting surface for ground-nesting invertebrates.
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Small Niche Bee Posts: To provide a varied habitat offering, we also integrated two of our small Niche bee posts into the garden's layout. These provided premium, standing deadwood cavities for aerial-nesting species, perfectly complementing the sand wall.
Immediate Ecological Results
Show gardens are notoriously busy, noisy environments. With tens of thousands of visitors passing through the NEC, one might assume the wildlife would stay away. However, because Niche products are engineered with a deep understanding of invertebrate ecology, function always prevails.
Within just days of the garden being installed—right in the middle of the bustling show—we had a leafcutter bee actively nesting in one of the bee posts, and a solitary wasp moving into the other!
A Perfect Match for People and Nature
Callum Corrie’s LEGO Garden was a resounding success and a massive hit with the crowds at Gardeners World Live. More importantly, it served as a powerful, high-profile demonstration that creating a space for nature doesn't mean sacrificing design. By integrating technical, commercial-grade biodiversity features into a highly creative setting, this project proved that functional ecology and brilliant landscape architecture are the perfect match.
