Best Show Garden at the 2017 Chelsea Flower Show was awarded to the M&G Garden, for which Helifix supplied some unseen, but critical, components.

The garden featured monumental blocks of limestone of varying sizes and the two largest stone clad steel towers, at 8m and 5m high, required temporary foundation support.

The Royal Horticultural Society does not allow any major excavations to be carried out and tree roots had to be avoided while whatever means of support was used had to be removed once the show was over. The ideal solution, overcoming all these potential problems, was provided by Helifix Dixie micro-piles, a technically innovative proprietary system certified by the International Code Council (ICC).

Helifix supplied 12 Dixie micro-piles. The circular, hollow section, piles were simply screwed vertically into the ground, using a hydraulic drive head, at the specified spacings and calculated torque, with no excavations or spoil removal.

The helical lead section was installed first followed by extension sections until they reached the load bearing strata. Each installed pile was then fitted with an engineered flat top plate bracket. These in turn were connected to specially made steel frames that formed the bases of the two stone clad columns, which were then constructed in sections.

Once the show was over the stone columns were dismantled and the reliable and economical Dixie micro-piles were easily extracted from the ground by simply being ‘unscrewed’.