Nature is making its mark on this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, with gardens showcasing wild habitats, resilient landscapes and natural planting.
Celebrities are getting a first glimpse of this year’s show on Monday, before the King and Queen tour the annual horticultural event at the Royal Hospital Chelsea celebrating all things gardening.
Celebrities including Cate Blanchett, Dame Joanna Lumley and David Tennant were among those getting a sneak preview of the world famous event, along with Sir David Suchet and Zoe Ball.
TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh was at the show, where he urged people to keep an eye out for Colorado beetles, which pose a “savage” threat to the British potato industry – with the first outbreak for 50 years recorded in 2023.
Dragon’s Den star Deborah Meaden described a “bit of a leap” in sustainable innovation at this year’s show after presenting the event’s award for best sustainable garden product of the year to Sneeboer Trading’s garden scoop.
And designers say many of the gardens this year have a “very natural feeling”, as people crave a connection with nature, with gravel paths bleeding into planting, paving with moss and plants growing through it and native plants from foxgloves to cow parsley featuring at the show.
Nigel Dunnett, whose Hospitalfield Arts Garden grown in sand evokes the Arbroath coast where the charity is based, said the sand-growing approach was a “hot topic” at the moment, as the UK struggles with a dry spring and the extremes of climate change loom.
And he said his garden was “plant-filled”, trying to fill as much of the space as they could with plants.
“That’s a common thing around most of the gardens. They do have a very natural feeling,” he said.
“Creating this immersive natural experience is something that people are really craving, rather than hard landscapes.
“It’s this connection with nature, which so many of us are now losing, and gardens and public places in cities are real opportunities to reintroduce people to.”
The garden is being relocated to a primary school in Arbroath after the show, and he added there was a “duty” to reconnect children with nature so that future generations could have the spark that prompts a love of gardening.
One of the most natural gardens at this year’s show is the Wildlife Trusts’ rainforest garden, highlighting Atlantic temperate rainforest habitat which once covered western coasts of Britain, the island of Ireland and the Isle of Man, but has shrunk from about a fifth of land to just 1%.
The garden highlights efforts by the trusts, in partnership with insurance company Aviva, to restore and protect the habitat, and show how nature-friendly gardening can help British wildlife.
The garden’s designer, Zoe Claymore, said: “We are going for perfectly imperfect and celebrating joy and life.”
She described the garden as organised chaos, pointing to trees “on the wonk” to showcase nature’s resilience, native plants and trees such as Welsh poppies, bluebells, cowslips and foxgloves, and highlighting mosses and ferns as the “stars of the show”.
“More wild is perfection, because perfection in horticulture isn’t about everything the same, it’s about the joy and connection plants bring you and nurture your soul,” she said.
“I think a more wild garden is more what it is to be human.”
And Rob Stoneman, director of landscape recovery at the Wildlife Trusts, said the garden featured species such as cow parsley, which was a common hedgerow plant that many thought of as a weed but was “beautiful”.
He said that since Victorian times, it was understood that gardens and green spaces could bring the countryside into the urban realm and benefit people’s health and mental health.
But a typical garden centre was filled with plastic and pesticides and had become artificial.
“I’m not saying all of that is bad, but actually, what we need to do is return back to this concept of bringing the countryside back into your piece of green space because you’ll get the benefits from that.”
He said the garden was peat and insecticide-free, and with native trees and plants, to help showcase how to “bring some of the wild to our city spaces”.
Elsewhere, dogs have been given a rare chance to access the Chelsea Flower Show, with Monty Don’s dog Ned among those checking out the dog garden, which the TV gardener helped create alongside the organisers, the Royal Horticultural Society and BBC Radio 2.
Mr Don revealed a fox had slept in the garden over the weekend and highlighted some key features, including a dog house where they are “allowed to lie on the sofas”, a gate that leads out to an “imaginary countryside” for walks and a lawn looking “quite trashed already”.
“Having said I would never, under any circumstances, do a show garden anywhere, let alone at Chelsea, the RHS persuaded me by bringing dogs into the equation and I can’t resist the combination of dogs and gardens, which I’ve always had,” he said.
“So from the outset this was a garden intended to be for an owner of dogs and I wanted it to be a very simple garden. There’s no message, there’s no hidden back story. It is what it is. What you see is what you get.”
The garden, which will not be judged, will be relocated to nearby Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, with Mr Don adding: “We’re here for a week but hopefully (in) Battersea forever.”
