Flower festivals are a great place to keep tabs on plant trends. Sometimes the same plants feature throughout the flower show. This year at RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival there were a few fabulous botanical stalwarts adding grace and beauty to the borders. What’s even more surprising is that many of them were not highly bred cultivars, but instead just as nature intended. Here are five plants stealing the limelight at this year’s show.
Echinacea pallida (Pale purple coneflower)
This is one of my all-time favourite plants, so to see it showcased in Carol Klein’s Iconic Horticultural Hero Garden at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, was a total delight. This is a real species of the enigmatic purple coneflower. It’s so perfect you might think it is a result of decades of breeding. But it’s not. This fairyesque flower is a species of echinacea, originating from the prairie rich lands of central America.
A magnet for pollinators with its honey-scented, nectar rich centre, the pale pink petals hang down like a hula skirt and waft in the breeze. It looks stunning planted with the soft blue flowers of eryngium. It’s a perennial and can be grown from seed.
Garden cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus)
Many of the show gardens at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival were seasoned with garden cosmos and it was a focus on the Plant Heritage display in the Floral Marquee. Garden cosmos are fabulous flowering plants that you can grow from seed. The flowers have beautiful silky petals and pollen rich yellow centres making them a magnet for pollinators, especially bees that collect the pollen for their offspring. Cosmos are also rich in nectar making them a convenient diner for all manner of pollinators that feed on sugar rich nectar to sustain their activity. The beautiful white cosmos is ‘Purity’, its single white flowers are a stunning addition to any garden and featured on Carol Klein’s Iconic Horticultural Hero Garden at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival.
Wild Carrot/Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)
Plants in the carrot family, now correctly named Apiaceae (formerly umbellifers) are fantastic garden plants. Many are highly sought after for flower arrangements, but you can actually grow carrot flowers from the tops you remove from your carrots. Wild carrots, also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, are really easy to grow from seed and each plant grows a number of domed flat heads of foamy white flowers. These are wonderful landing pads for many pollinators, especially the short-tongued hoverflies, wasps and flies that can feed from the nectar rich flowers. Wild carrot was used in many of the gardens at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival to great effect. The plants are biennials which means if you sow them now, the plants will be in flower in your garden this time next year.
Foxgloves (Digitalis spp)
Foxgloves in all their forms and glory, season the showground at this year’s Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. From the familiar purple fairy gloves (Digitalis purpurea) to the dainty, digitalis ferruginea and parviflora, the species foxgloves really stole the show. But a wander into the Floral Marquee unveiled a wider range of more highly bred forms of these fantastical flowers. Beautiful cream trumpets splashed with magenta, and some amazing pink and orange forms that offer pure drama and vibrancy. You can grow many of them from seed, most are biennials, and all have spires of tubular flowers, rich in nectar making them magnets for long tongued insects in search of a sugar rush.
Roses (Rosa spp)
Every garden needs a rose or two, and every flower festival needs a rose marquee. This year’s Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival did not disappoint in terms of roses and the Rose Marquee with its Rose Garden outside was richly planted with some fabulous forms of this versatile plant. New for 2023 – Rose ‘Penelope Lively’ from David Austin Roses let her presence be known not just by her beauty but also her raspberry rich, fruity rose scent. The deep berry red buds open to mid-pink double cupped flowers in open sprays that are the epitome of summer.
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