RHS Chelsea Flower Show is all about picking up information and ideas and asking us to think about how we might take our gardens forward. With messages around sustainable materials and climate conscious planting, gardeners are being encouraged to widen their palette to consider not just beauty but a more inclusive appeal to all of our garden visitors.
Here are some ideas to get you thinking about how you might approach your own planting.
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Planting ideas and trends from Chelsea Flower Show
Cultivated weeds
While weeds were rebranded as heroes at Chelsea 2023 - and there were examples aplenty in many of the gardens - there were also lots of ‘weed-like’ plants worth noting. These are cultivated plants that still hark back to their humble origins, such as dead nettle lamiums or this Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’.
Perfectly placed growing in a nook next to the hearth on Cleve West’s Centrepoint garden, it echoes herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), also featured on the garden, with its small typical cranesbill flowers and more gentle sprawling habit. It has perhaps a slightly more impactful, more refined appearance.
Two’s company in pots
Chelsea gardens are packed with amazing plants – and plant lists picked up from the gardens are often long. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rosemary Coldstream’s Feels Like Home garden in the Container Garden category in 2023 paired plants perfectly in a series of pots – each with just two plants in, allowing focussed associations and appreciation. Plants were carefully chosen by Rosemary to reflect her New Zealand heritage. Here’s just two of her arrangements.
Pittosporum tenuifolium Banoway Bay (= 'Breebay') and Erigeron karvinskianus ‘Profusion’
Pachystegia insignis - Marlborough rock daisy, paired with a simple small-leaved shrub.
Filling the gaps
There aren’t usually that many gaps on a Chelsea garden but where there are, they offer brilliant opportunities.
In his garden for Myeloma UK in 2023, Chris Beardshaw added a green tracery to his paving with the creeping Soleirolia soleirolii that then swirls around his water feature bringing hard landscaping, ornament and planting together.
Here's more water feature inspiration from Chelsea
Simple stars
Thinking about planting doesn’t have to be complex – thoughtful, yes; overwhelming no.
The single starry Anemone rivularis nestled amid Melica uniflora f. albida, on Tom Hoblyn’s garden in 2023 for Boodles, was perfection. Tom’s use of the Melica with its raindrop-effect inflorescences picked up on his ingenious raindrop water feature.
Choice colour palette
Sarah Price’s painterly garden from 2023 had some serene colouring with a masterfully considered colour palette that linked many of the plants and materials in the garden.
Here the purple flushed falls of starring Iris ‘Benton Olive’ were picked up in the purple Linaria maroccana ‘Licilia Azure’. And gently repeated to draw the eye through the garden.
Listen to Sarah Price talk about her Chelsea garden on our podcast
Silver appeal
Designer Filippo Dester’s Mediterranean-style for Hamptons and Garden Club London from Chelsea 2023 felt light and warm, much of which came from the use of silver foliage, such as Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ and a fig tree at the back of the garden, helping to bounce the light and create highlights.
In this image the architectural, silver foliage of the Cynara cardunculus is picked up in the white of the umbellifer Melanoselinum decipiens ‘Black Parsley’, which itself has a tinge of pink that echoes the Acanthus spinosa, and in turn links back to the warm pink of the background wall.
Chance planting
Brownfield, gravelly, substrate planting was definitely on show, which while we aren’t all being asked to fill our gardens with rubble, does show the potential of chance plantings in places we might previously have ignored – or equally the need to embrace diverse ideas of gardens as our climate becomes more extreme and we search for more shared green spaces in our cities and towns.
Here’s a simple example of the sort of opportunistic, resilient planting that can bring benefits to health, wellbeing and pollinators. In John Davies and Steve Wiliams’s Centre for Mental Health Balance Garden from 2023, Papaver rhoeas, purple toadflax Linaria purpurea, corn chamomile Anthemis arvensis, wild rocket Diplotaxis tenuifolia – gone to seed but the pods can be harvested for a punchy salad crunch – and the pretty yellow flowers of wild mustard Sinapis arvensis prove that tough-grown, weedy choices very much have a place in our future planting choices.