The presenting line up for this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show has been announced, with some new presenters in the mix.
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Among the contributors to the daily BBC Two evening show, hosted by Monty Don, Arit Anderson and Rachel de Thame, will be Jamie Butterworth, who is also creating a dog-friendly garden with Monty at the show.
Jamie is a plant expert, one of the country’s youngest commercial nursery owners and an author.
Aged 30, Jamie has had something of a meteoric rise in the world of horticulture, having become interested in plants at a young age. While he didn't come from a gardening family, his earliest gardening memory from his childhood in Yorkshire is "flicking through the TV channels when I was nine, and coming across Gardeners’ World – I was immediately captivated. I asked my mum if she would buy me some seeds, pots and compost. I still remember that feeling of excitement and wonder, watching seeds germinate, grow, and then flower."
Aged just 12, he created his first garden at his grandparents' Wakefield home. By the age of 16, he was a finalist in BBC3’s Young Gardener of the Year. Through the show, he met Alex Denman, then Show Manager at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. "Alex took me to Chelsea and I knew in an instant that was where I wanted to be."
Having worked in nurseries from the age of 15, Jamie went straight from school to spend two years training at Askham Bryan College in York, and then moved south to study and work at RHS Garden Wisley, leaving in 2015 with a distinction in the Diploma in Practical Horticulture.
He then worked at the plant nursery Hortus Loci, where part of his job was to grow plants for Chelsea designers. He set up his own nursery, Form Plants, just before the pandemic in 2020. The nursery specialises in woody plants such as trees, hedging and topiary and works mostly with garden designers, landscape architects and landscapers.
Jamie has worked on many show gardens and mostly recently won Gold at Chelsea in 2022 with the ‘The Place2Be' garden and at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival in 2024, where he collaborated with Anya Lautenbach on the Money-Saving Garden. He project-managed Jihae Hwang’s ‘A Letter from a Million Years Past’ garden at Chelsea in 2023. "Even though I’ve delivered gold-medal winning gardens, I will always see myself as a plantsman first and foremost. I don’t call myself a garden designer – for me, it’s all about the plants," he says.
If all of these achievements weren't enough, in 2013 Jamie co-founded YoungHorts, a social media movement that aimed to inspire more young people into the world of horticulture. And in 2016, aged just 21, he became the youngest ever RHS Ambassador, joining leading industry experts such as Alan Titchmarsh, Mary Berry and Carol Klein.
Jamie is the author of RHS 50 Plants You Can’t Kill (Mitchel Beazley 2019).
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His new book, What Grows Together: Fail-safe Plant Combinations for Every Garden (DK) will be published on 4 September 2025.
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Jamie is not new to presenting. He made his first appearance on Gardeners’ World in 2023 and has had regular slots on ITV’s Love Your Weekend, as well as radio, including BBC Radio London, Talk Radio and BBC Berkshire.
"Since my teenage years I have been somewhat obsessed with RHS Chelsea Flower Show, watching the gardens on TV, and idolising the designers," Jamie told Gardens Illustrated in 2018 while he was working at Hortus Loci. Having supplied plants, created gardens and now presenting the show, he has truly come full circle. He told his Instagram followers: "For me, as a plantsman, Chelsea is the Greatest Show on Earth, and to be part of the BBC coverage is a life's ambition."