When holistic gardener Kim van Niekerk received a phone call from South Korean garden designer Ji-hae Hwang asking if she could help as a volunteer with the planting of her RHS Chelsea 2023 garden, A Letter from a Million Years Past, she dropped everything and got on a plane to London
from her home in South Africa.
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Having worked with Ji-hae on her previous Chelsea show garden a decade earlier, Kim felt it was an experience money couldn’t buy. For three weeks she was on site by 7am, not leaving until eight in the evening, so she could observe Ji-hae at work when everyone else had gone home. “I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says.
You’ve got to be ready for hard, physical work, rather than think, ‘I’ll pop in for a day and then I’ve done Chelsea’ Susie Challen, volunteer
Paying full price for a ticket is not the only way to see Chelsea. As a volunteer you not only get to see round the iconic flower show for free, but you also get a unique insight into how the event is put together, as well as having the satisfaction of knowing you have contributed.
At this year’s Chelsea there will be around 230 RHS volunteers carrying out a range of roles from sharing information on RHS feature gardens to helping visitors find exhibits and plants. In addition, each exhibitor brings its own team with a combination of staff, contractors and volunteers, all of whom must adhere to RHS guidelines on health and safety.
One of the main roles for volunteers is to staff the gardens and stands during show week. This can be a brilliant opportunity to support a cause you care about.
We make sure people have breaks; it’s important they get to go round and see what’s going on, as they’ve volunteered because they want to learn more about the show Jo Thompson, garden designer
Shubha Allard, a retired consultant haematologist who volunteers for the Hertfordshire branch of the National Garden Scheme (NGS), did a six-hour stint on Tom Stuart-Smith’s Gold-medal winning garden for the NGS last year, standing at the edge of the garden talking to the public. “It’s hard work. You’re constantly talking, and you’ve got to have quite a few facts up your sleeve, but it’s hugely satisfying,” she says.
Kerrie Lloyd- Dawson, who also volunteered on the NGS garden on a very wet afternoon, has more prosaic advice. “Wear comfortable shoes, bring a raincoat and don’t wear a long, floaty dress if it’s raining.”
Another important role for volunteers is supporting planting teams. Susie Challen, a graduate of The English Gardening School’s design diploma, helped out on Richard Miers’ Perennial Garden ‘With Love’ in 2022 alongside the paid planting team.
Volunteers were asked to do a minimum of three days with duties including tending to plants and moving them around. “You’ve got to be ready for hard, physical work, rather than think ‘I’ll pop in for a day and then I’ve done Chelsea’,” says Susie, who also helped on last year’s NGS garden.
Philip Rankin, a GP who, alongside his medical career, is retraining in horticulture at Pelham Plants nursery in East Sussex, volunteered on its stand in the Great Pavilion last year as part of the Plant Fairs Roadshow.
He was doing everything from helping to grow the plants, to setting up and staffing the stand during the show, then selling the plants off and taking stock back to the nursery at the end of the week. “It helped me appreciate the huge amount of work and planning that goes into Chelsea, far prior to the days itself. It’s a very safe, supportive way to get involved with something that is massive,” he says.
Garden designer Jane Porter, who is running the planting team for Nigel Dunnett’s Hospitalfield Arts Garden at this year’s Chelsea, volunteered on planting teams for three show gardens before doing her own, and says she could not have done it without that experience.
But she remembers during one of those stints arriving on-site a few days before the rest of the planting team and working alongside the mainly male landscapers. “Then when the plants arrived, the site filled up with women, who I realised, like me, probably weren’t getting paid. The landscapers are mostly paid, and I was struck by this gender divide.”
She adds that although it can be a brilliant opportunity, volunteering is a complex issue: “People on lower incomes are less likely to be able to volunteer and other barriers such as paying for childcare exclude a lot of people from being able to benefit from gaining that experience.”
On her own show gardens, Jane pays her planting teams and firmly believes that while there is a “healthy role for volunteers in terms of student involvement”, experienced horticulturists should be reimbursed: “Paying gardeners is too often an afterthought despite the years of experience and training they bring.”
Four-times Gold medal winner at Chelsea Jo Thompson, who this year is designing a garden for The Glasshouse charity, agrees that while there is a place for volunteers, it is incumbent on individual designers to make sure they allocate part of the overall budget to pay core planting teams. “It seems strange that for a flower show, the one supplier that often isn’t paid in a lot of the gardens is the plantsperson.”
She adds: “There might be graduates or people who haven’t done it before who don’t expect to be paid, but why would you not pay your planting team when they’re doing exactly the same as the landscape contractors, just with different materials?”
Nina Baxter, who runs the Planting Design Diploma at the London College of Garden Design, manages Jo’s planting team, and has a checklist to ensure volunteers are well looked after. Jo says: “We make sure people have breaks; it’s important they get to go round and see what’s going on as they’ve volunteered because they want to learn more about the show. If it’s hot, bring sunscreen and hats, bring named tools, and of course we make sure there are plenty of snacks.”
Garden designer and planting consultant Gillian Goodson, who has led planting teams for many award-winning Chelsea gardens, also pays her core team, but admits that because of limited resources, it is not always possible to pay everyone, even when they would like to. She has also volunteered and mentored in other people’s gardens, especially for those who are new to shows.
“I have been a volunteer in the past. Sometimes we trade our time for the experience or the challenge,” she says. “Some just like to be able to say on their social media platforms that they’ve been involved at Chelsea for the day. That said, we try to look after volunteers and be there for them. The volunteering can be taken for granted, but overall the majority of us know what it’s like to have been a volunteer and look out for new ones as much as possible.”
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