The annual Chelsea Flower Show is in full swing alongside the Chelsea Embankment in London. For a whole week the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital are completely transformed into a horticultural spectacle that is often hailed as the Greatest Flower Show on Earth. It’s quite an accolade to live up to. But the garden designers, growers and landscapers have yet again risen to the challenge creating seven dazzling show gardens along main avenue, as well as countless additional gardens throughout the showgrounds.
Here is a peek at five of the gardens at this year’s show. In no particular order.
Forest Bathing Garden
This garden encapsulates the healing effect of vitamin G and vitamin V otherwise known as gardens and nature. Forest bathing is a wonderful description of the way you can reconnect with nature by simply being within its embrace in a garden, woodland or natural setting. In this small space this garden awakens the imagination with the cool, but powerful planting of birch trees, underplated with a tapestry of woodland plants, connecting visitors to the natural world.
Designed as a much-needed place of solace and reflection for those affected with the wasting disease Muscular Dystrophy, this garden shows how an accessible garden can be immersive and create a place of refuge to patients and their families through their journey. A flint wall, where the raw faces represent muscle cells, creates a communal hub representing shelter as well as emotional and practical support.
Designed by Ula Maria
Sponsored by Muscular Dystrophy UK and Project Giving Back
The WaterAid Garden
With unpredictable rainfall, drier and warmer temperatures and floods and droughts, gardeners need to be more water aware. The WaterAid garden explores these challenges, focussing on sustainable water management and featuring beautiful plants that have been chosen to cope with varying levels of rainfall. The focal point is a rain-harvesting pavilion that could be replicated in many gardens. It provides shade and shelter while collecting, filtering and storing every drop of water. But it is beautiful in its own right, creating a sculptural feel to the garden and contrasting with the watery elements.
The garden features permeable surfaces to ensure good drainage, preventing flooding issues in heavy rain.
The plants have been chosen to boost biodiversity and include alder trees that love growing waterside. The roots have nitrogen fixing nodules and are able to absorb heavy metals from industrial waste. Water plants such as water violet (Hottonia palustris) and bog bean (Menyanthes trifoliata) help oxygenate the water and provide shelter and habitat to wildlife. Beautiful blue irises add to the soft colour palette of lush green and soft yellow, emphasising the water feeling.
Designed by Tom Massey and Je Ahn.
Sponsored by WaterAid and Project Giving Back
The Octavia Hill Garden
There’s a lovely soft and inclusive feel to this garden. It’s designed for a community in an urban setting where people may not have had the privilege and joy of plants and nature. It is a reflection of this very principle that was the life work of Octavia Hill (1838-1912), a founder of the National Trust who believed that the ‘healthy gift of air and the joy of plants and flowers’ were vital for everyone. It’s a concept that is now widely appreciated and understood. This beautiful, plant-filled garden created in her honour, is also designed to reflect her vision and to stimulate physical, mental and social wellbeing.
The garden is planted to increase urban-biodiversity and to submerge visitors into the depts of nature so that may create intimate connections with nature and especially plants and wildlife. It’s seasoned with sturdy seating that have been enveloped into separate open-air seating areas. The levels slope providing wheelchair access to a shade canopy, the wildlife pond and even a walking stream.
Look out for the pollinator plants, bird boxes and habitat panels in the retaining wall, all incorporated to boost the biodiversity by providing nesting sites. Spires of foxgloves and clumps of hardy geraniums create a rich planting palette that also provides precious food for pollinators.
Designed by Ann Marie Powell and the Blue Diamond Team.
Sponsored by Blue Diamond Garden Centres and National Trust
The National Garden Scheme Garden
How do you design a garden that encapsulates almost one hundred years of open gardens raising money for charity?? You use plants from real NGS garden owners and create a community garden where the sharing ethos combines with the therapeutic powers of the garden.
The soft woodland planting of hazel creates a cool, lush and magnetic feel, drawing visitors in to the communal hub, made from reclaimed timber, perhaps for tea and cake as they might on an open garden day. Clumps of soft greenish and white astrantias ‘Star of Billion’ meld the planting together. Accents of blue Siberian irises season the waterside planting, but it is the striking white and green effect created with woodland perennials that is the starring role, leading down to the cool sanctuary of the timber hut nestled deep in the garden.
Designed by Tom Stuart Smith
Sponsored by the National Garden Scheme and Project Giving Back
Imagine the world to be different
This garden has been designed to encourage visitors to cherish the earth and each other. It highlights the role of gardens as spaces that welcome, heal and provide space for contemplation, recognising the power of urban green spaces to revitalise mind, body and soul. Offering a message of hope, especially for future generations to envision a different world, by showing how nature can reclaim the scars of past wars and old bomb sites. It celebrates the importance of London’s ‘pocket parks’ often linked with historic churchyards and some still bearing the scars of war, but surviving its destruction. Resilient plants that found a foothold in the ruins of St James’s after the war are featured within the garden, seeds carried by the wind offering a sign of hope and regrowth.
Pass through the archway into this haven of contemplation where nature takes centre stage with a carpet of woodland planting. The garden provides a sanctuary for urban dwellers too and includes a counselling hut.
As a garden sanctuary it blends history with ecological diversity, borrowing the plane trees that line the Chelsea showground to nurture a tradition of ‘conversations under trees’.
Designed by Robert Myers
Sponsored by St James’s Piccadilly and Project Giving Back
