RHS Chelsea Flower Show 21 May 2024: Part 1
The route from Sloane Square station to the Royal Hospital, Chelsea is lined with flower show themed window displays. Roses, daisies and a panoply of picturesque edibles adorn the show-goers’ outfits. All this creates a growing sense of excitement as you approach the showground. I booked the tickets back in dreary November and here I am at last at the entrance to the greatest flower show in the world. Sadly, on Tuesday morning the weather was more dreary November than balmy May, but as soon as I reached the first show garden that faint niggle melts away.
The plot on the corner of Royal Hospital Way and Main Avenue (for this one week in May, the routes around the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea acquire street names) is occupied this year by The National Garden Scheme Garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith. Celebrating the wonderful charity that raises funds for nursing and health charities, the garden is designed as a woodland edge garden. The green and white colour scheme felt immensely calming, with pale flowers in contrasting shapes lining the path to the oak hut. Coincidentally, one of the volunteers stewarding the garden I recognised as Sarah Pajwani, whose beautiful garden St Timothee in Pinckney’s Green, near Maidenhead, I visited in January. She kindly said she recognised me too. She explained that many of the herbaceous plants had been donated by NGS garden owners including Melica altissima Alba, the delicate grass at the bottom left of this image, which came from her garden.
Ann-Marie Powell designed the neighbouring garden, inspired by the legacy of Octavia Hill, a founder of the National Trust, who pioneered access to open spaces for urban workers. For the first time, the RHS has introduced a Children’s Choice Award for the garden voted as the best in show by a panel of young judges and this garden won the award. The children clearly loved the colourful planting designed to attract wildlife. The tactile hand-carved benches are made from reclaimed timber from National Trust sites. While we were admiring the garden, Andy Jasper, Director of Gardens and Parklands at National Trust, brought out a precious cutting from the Sycamore Gap tree to show us onlookers.
There’s a National Trust connection with the next port of call, the Bridgerton Garden, because NT Osterley, where I volunteer on Friday mornings, was used as a location in the latest season of the show. Here the romantic style planting softened the stonework structures and, like both the gardens I’ve already mentioned, featured foxgloves. As did its neighbour, The Burma Skincare Initiative Garden, which highlights the work of a partnership supporting Burmese healthcare workers to treat and manage skin disease. In this image a boardwalk snakes over a pool to a traditional Burmese stilt house, blue Anchusa azurea lining the path.
Several years ago, Kazuyuki Ishihara designed a garden featuring a garage housing a mini and using his trademark surfaces of living moss. A spectacular waterfall forms the backdrop to his garden this year, the graceful acers and Siberian irises giving colour in an otherwise green scene. To one side of the garden a living wall of sedum camouflages a building. At the next plot we chatted to a representative of Landform Consultants, the contractors who designed and constructed the garden for financial consultants, Killik & Co. It was fascinating to hear about the complicated logistics involved in constructing then dismantling a show garden. Landform are involved in several gardens across the show. I was interested to see Cirsium used in the planting scheme in this garden, the pollinator-friendly thistle flowers vividly cerise with the acid yellow of an Achillea.
15 or so years ago willow sculptor Tom Hare displayed several huge seedhead sculptures along the mini Broad Walk leading from Kew Gardens’ Elizabeth Gate to the Orangery restaurant. I spotted his trademark style in the willow waves which flow through the garden made for Freedom from Torture, between groups of drought resistant plants supplied by Beth Chatto’s Plants and Gardens, where one of the first gravel gardens was created. This garden will be moved to the North London HQ of the charity for use as a place for rest and rehabilitation by the survivors supported by the organisation. A bread oven presides over a sunken communal space, a pebble mosaic forming an eye-catching centrepiece. Like several other gardens at Chelsea this has been funded by Project Giving Back.
Where philanthropy and horticulture meet:
Project Giving Back’s website
Project Giving Back is the vision of two private individuals who want to support a wide range of charitable causes whose work suffered during the global Covid-19 pandemic and continues to be affected by the economic downturn and cost-of-living crisis. The grant-making scheme gives UK-based charities and other charitable organisations the chance to apply for a fully-funded garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, subject to the usual RHS selection process. This is a unique opportunity for charities to raise awareness of and support for their work at the world’s most famous horticultural event.
The other side of the climate change coin was tackled in the garden next door, Flood Re: The Flood Resilient Garden. Designed to harvest rainwater and minimise flooding during a period of exceptionally heavy rain, the central feature of the garden is a ‘swale’ where an ephemeral stream channels water into a pond. Additional tanks store water and the rain chains leading from the extra wide guttering are a stylish and effective alternative to downpipes. I loved the planting scheme: foxgloves and Verbascum in varying shades of pink with silvery poppies clustering at the foot of the spectacularly pollarded willow. Rodgersia with its deep pink zig-zag stems grows happily at the pond’s edge alongside Siberian Iris.
The World Child Cancer Garden is essentially a container garden formed of a series of circular raised beds of varying heights in a ‘keyhole’ shape, each with a gap leading to the hollow centre for access purposes. The beds themselves are made with interlocking 3D printed terracotta blocks, the soft reddish colour of which echoes paths of reclaimed brick and sets off the greyish leaves of aromatic plants such as Artemisia. We were intrigued to learn that the sculpted forms topping the posts punctuating the space were made from light tan leather, each designed to represent the five senses. Another garden financed by Project Giving Back, this calming space is to be re-located to the charity’s facility in Bristol accommodating families where a child is having cancer treatment.
I liked the soft lemon and apricot shades of the bearded Iris and Geum Tangerine Dream in the foreground of the next garden, again the work of Landform and sponsored by jewellers Boodles to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery. I was intrigued to read since my visit that the metal canoe-like structures were inspired by the play of light on water in a canvas by Monet: ‘The Museum at Le Havre’.
Resilience was again the theme in the next garden on our tour of the show, co-designed by Tom Massey, the pioneer of this movement so important to address the challenges and opportunities faced by gardeners because of climate change. With wetter milder winters and hotter dryer summers, harvesting rainwater is becoming ever more important and the graceful funnel forms of the pavilion at the heart of The WaterAid Garden do just that. Tom Massey’s co-designer for this inspiring garden is architect Je Ahn. Before being raised into the air onto seemingly delicate pillars, the roof of each funnel was planted up. Enormously tall alder trees are planted around and through the eye-catching structure. Plants adapted to suit the damp conditions in this part of the garden: ragged robin, Siberian iris and Rodgersia, looked very at home. Foxgloves and Sanguisorba line the stone path leading to the pavilion. A conifer with a strongly horizontal silhouette, a form of Pinus, contrasts with the lighter greens of a field maple.
Whilst it’s not possible to walk onto and through these show gardens, the perspective that the average show-goer sees is often a path leading tantalisingly to a structure at the rear of the garden. In the National Autistic Society Garden the wooden boardwalk lined with the greyish-blue flowers of Camassia leads to a cork-block structure. Intended as a metaphor for the masking strategy adopted by some autistic people to blend in and be more accepted in society, the structure and the garden will be transferred in due course to a supported living site in Scotland. This is another garden built by Landform and financed by Project Giving Back. And another featuring a rain chain.
Two structures dominate the St James’s Piccadilly garden: one a recreation of a corner of the Sir Christopher Wren designed church itself, complete with vast arched window, and the other a circular timber cabin topped by a tall spire which, when the garden is re-located to the church’s garden, will be used for a drop-in counselling service. The bed which hugs the cabin exemplifies the largely green and white planting theme, with foxgloves, ferns (Blechnum spicant) and silvery Brunnera macrophylla Jack Frost clustered around the foot of a handsome Cornus kousa. The design incorporates a reference to artist Mary Delany* (1700-1788) to whom there is a memorial in the church. Her exquisite paper-cut flowers created using layers of coloured tissue paper on a black background can be seen in the British Museum. This and the next garden are financed by Project Giving Back.
I was happy to see the white-flowered Brunnera macrophylla Betty Bowring, used in the underplanting of more than 50 birch trees in Muscular Dystrophy UK’s forest bathing garden. As is always the way at Chelsea, some plants seem to crop up in several show gardens, and here again is the dainty white grass Melica altissima Alba. This garden generated a very serene atmosphere, which will be invaluable when it is recreated at the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine in Oxford.
Hard landscaping featuring jagged Welsh slate emulates a quarry cut into a hillside, with woodland giving way to a flooded pool in the Terrence Higgins Trust Bridge to 2030 garden. Pale coloured flowers and foliage give way to a more colourful scheme towards the centre of the garden, with a couple of plants seen elsewhere in the show: the wine-red poppy, Papaver somniferum Lauren’s Grape and the dark peach-pink spires of Verbascum Petra. The dots of red which lead the eye from the pale to the deeper shades were I later read, the almost circular flowerheads of Dianthus cruentus. Discovering plants I’ve not encountered before, whether species like this one or new cultivars, is for me one of the joys of the Chelsea Flower Show.
I’ve tried here to do justice to the eight sanctuary and eight show gardens at this year’s show, but I’ve realised, compiling this account of the show gardens, that I failed for some reason to photograph the Stroke Association’s Garden for Recovery. I must have been distracted by watching the process of Adam Frost presenting to camera and interviewing the designer, Miria Harris. I also remember that is was at this point that the rain began to fall, and indeed it rained for the rest of the day.
In the second part of this blog I’ll visit a children only garden, a Roman villa, the balcony and container gardens and explore the Great Pavilion.
Kew Gardens, 25 May 2024
*In 2022 David Austin Roses renamed the ‘Mortimer Sackler’ rose ‘Mary Delany’ in her honour.