After a five-year break, designer Andy Sturgeon is returning to RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2027. He will create a show garden on Main Avenue for Child Bereavement UK, the leading provider of grief support for children, young people, and parents grieving a baby or child.
The Child Bereavement UK Garden is one of three sponsored by the grant-making charity Project Giving Back (PGB), which is making a surprise return for Chelsea 2027 after previously extending its support only for 2025 and 2026.
The designer
The garden will be Andy Sturgeon’s 11th at RHS Chelsea; he has previously won Best in Show three times and is a multi-Gold-medal winner.
Andy also has a personal connection to Child Bereavement UK, as he received its support following the death of his partner in 2009, and has drawn on his own experience of bereavement – and that of his three children – for the design.
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The Child Bereavement UK Garden
Andy hopes the garden will serve to encourage conversations about grief and emphasise the importance of ensuring no one faces bereavement alone. In creating the garden, he has worked with Child Bereavement UK’s Youth Ambassadors and bereaved parents to help shape the design. Some ambassadors have had a connection to the charity since childhood, and will help build the garden's tall mud walls during its construction.
Andy said, “After more than two decades of showcasing gardens at RHS Chelsea, I’m delighted to return following a five-year break to create a garden for Child Bereavement UK.
"Through my own personal experience, and from listening to the individual lived perspectives of the charity’s Youth Ambassadors and bereaved parents, I hope the garden will offer a space for private and shared reflection, encourage more open conversations about grief, and foster recognition that everyone’s experience is different."
The design
The design of the garden will reflect how grief can make the world feel unfamiliar, as people navigate a personal journey difficult to put into words. As the path through bereavement is non-linear, linearity is 'banished' here.
Andy and his team have introduced views and vignettes in all directions, while gentle cascades create movement in the 18-metre water pool, representing change and optimism. The pool will be framed by rammed-concrete walls, steps and layers, which will define a series of paths, with 'sittable' walls and seats providing plenty of spaces to stop and pause or socialise.
In the middle will be a welcoming space to pause, reflect and have open conversations about grief.
Unashamedly 'low-tech', the garden will feature natural colours throughout, and be dominated by three monolithic mud walls, representing the murky nature of grief. Up to 2.5m in height, the scale of the walls hint at the ever-present weight of grief.
The garden is meant to feel "different", as Andy describes grief as “other worldly” and “not normal or familiar”; so it does not read as a typical English garden.
“Grief is evolving and changing but it is always there," he says. "The angles of the walls and the relationships between them look different from wherever you are. You cannot see or understand everything all at once.
“Children experience grief in different ways and their experience of grief continues to change as they grow older. It is not static. Grief is not linear and often does not follow the typical pattern that has often been perceived. This is reflected in the garden layout and will allow those emotions to be explained and discussed.
"Grief means your emotions change, whether that be sadness or happiness or something else, something less tangible. You wonder why you feel like this and you can’t always clearly see what you are looking at. So, there are different places within this garden, each with a different atmosphere. Some are open and obvious, others are hidden or partially obscured.”
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As for the structures, Andy has drawn on his experience of spending a year designing gardens in Kenya and Rwanda. The garden will feature cob walls made from adobe, one of Africa's most common building materials, which he saw in the mud cities of Djenné and Timbuktu in Mali. Adobe bricks are made from sand, clay, water and organic binds like straw and dung, then shaped by hand and dried in the sun.
Combining this approach with the subsoil, sand, straw and water of traditional cob walls found in parts of the UK, Andy has developed a hybrid design to create a boundary wall with lime render applied by hand. The modular bricks will be dismantled after the show and either returned to the earth or reused for future projects.
The garden will also reuse reclaimed materials from previous RHS Chelsea gardens, include the steel railing from Patrick Clarke’s 2026 garden for The Children’s Society.
The planting
Visitors can expect to see around 3,000 plants with a variety of foliage forms, textures and colours, from fresh greens to greys and blues. Andy has added flowers through the mounds to punctuate the planting, and spiky yucca for an exotic look.
For the design, Andy has drawn on his previous RHS Chelsea gardens and his own sand garden in East Sussex, using plants he knows will grow happily in the UK, with just a few risks. He has also taken inspiration from Mexico, South America and Australia, as well as the Mediterranean basin, to bring a more exotic quality to the planting.
Some stand-out plants include a nine-metre-tall cut-leaf elm, Zelkova × verschaffeltii, associated with Japanese streetscapes; Kniphofia thompsonii var. thompsonii, a tall, elegant red-hot poker; and architectural restios originating from South Africa, for distinctive structure and texture.
The future of the garden
The garden will have a permanent home at a Westerleigh Group crematorium in the UK after the Chelsea Flower Show. Child Bereavement UK hopes the garden will normalise conversations around grief, as well as prove the important role the charity's specialist bereavement support provides in helping families rebuild their lives.
Fergus Crow, Child Bereavement UK's chief executive said: “The Child Bereavement UK Garden at RHS Chelsea is an important opportunity to raise awareness of the vital support our charity offers to bereaved children, young people and families, helping us reach more people who need support so they don’t have to face their grief alone.
"We are hugely grateful to Project Giving Back for making this garden possible and the additional support provided by Westerleigh Group. Its legacy beyond RHS Chelsea will also create a lasting space for remembering loved ones, extending the garden’s impact well after the show has ended.”
