Highlights and trends from RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023: sustainability, wildlife and weeds

This year’s show gardens let nature do the talking, as gardening editor Hannah Stephenson discovers.

Gardens featuring more weeds and less formality have taken centre stage at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, placing more emphasis on letting nature take control.

Native plants and trees, nettles, dandelions and a predominantly green palette of planting feature in many of the 36 show gardens, along with salvaged and upcycled materials. Elsewhere, huge bursts of colour remain in the Great Pavilion, while first-time exhibitors include mushroom growers the Caley Bros.

This year’s show is likely to spark controversy, reckons garden designer Andrew Duff, co-chair of the Society of Garden Designers and managing director of the Inchbald School of Design.

“There’s a clear message about sustainability and environmental factors in an aesthetic way. There’s a loss about actually, what is a garden supposed to do?” he says. “Right across the show, the inference is that nature’s taking control… maybe that it’s OK to let weeds grow and let things get a little bit ruinous.

“But at the end of the day, people like a lawn, they like to look after a space – that’s part of being in a garden – and it’s time that we need (to address) that controversy,” Duff adds.

Reflecting on the topic, Matthew Pottage, curator of RHS Garden Wisley, says: “We are having a climate crisis. We do need to garden environmentally sensitively. Is this the place to be showing that? It’s arguably the world’s best flower show, so this is the place.”

5 highlight gardens from this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Centrepoint Garden

Love it or hate it, this garden is likely to cause a stir with its partly demolished house, so-called ‘weeds’ and a fallen tree. Designer Cleve West has admitted it’s a ‘Marmite garden’ – people will love it or hate it.

“There’s a sense of abandonment, which is so clever. Cleve West has done a partly demolished ruined house with the idea of nature taking over,” Duff observes. “He’s saying it’s a metaphor for what it is to be young and homeless. There are nettles and dandelion seedheads. It’s really going to question what beauty is in a plant – and I think we need to have that discussion.”

Nurture Landscapes Garden

If you’re looking to take home some plants with you, be inspired by the beautiful Benton irises in rich shades of pastels and deep yellows which you’ll see in designer Sarah Price’s Nurture Landscapes show garden, inspired by the artist and plantsman Cedric Morris.

Memoria and GreenAcres Transcendence Garden

Designers Gavin McWilliam and Andrew Wilson’s garden aims to deliver an uplifting spiritual space, reflecting the emotional experience at the end of life (it’s going to a bereavement site after the show).

“Controversially, they’ve used concrete, but with the idea that this concrete is going to be around for hundreds of years,” says Duff. “It’s not a single use concrete.

“It has a simple palette of planting, is cool and calm and you immediately feel rested. The minimal use of materials and colour palette was really special and a moment of calm in the entire show. It was a relief to get to it,” Duff adds.

Myeloma UK – A Life Worth Living Garden

Top designer Chris Beardshaw’s garden has a much more traditional garden feel, with a structured order in the colourful planting against a backdrop of clipped yew, including peonies and salvias, plus inspired woodland planting.

Horatio’s Garden

Putting wheelchair access at the forefront of their design, Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg (Harris Bugg Studio), have created the eighth garden for the eponymous charity, which builds gardens to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injury.

The wheelchair-accessible space, influenced by the ways of seeing from a bed or a wheelchair, features tactile stone cairn and a table water feature to encourage wildlife, while a garden pod provides a cocooning place for physical and emotional shelter. After the show it will be relocated to Sheffield’s Princess Royal Spinal Cord Injuries Centre.

“There’s an incredible depth of planting, which is mind-blowingly beautiful, and beehives of warm cut stone which kind of replace topiary – they’ve made topiary out of stone,” says Duff.

Top trends

These are some of the key gardening trends to emerge from this year’s event.

Wildlife

“Unsurprisingly, there’s going to be the awareness of wildlife-friendly planting,” says Pottage. “There’s lots of habitat in gardens, but hopefully showing that can be beautiful as well. There are lots of logpiles, lots of water, lots of native plants, but also lots of gardenesque planting.”

Reclaimed and reused

Crushed concrete, piles of rubble, bare sand, re-used bricks and other recycled material dominate many of the show gardens’ pathways and form decorative features in several gardens. There’s a message to get gardeners thinking about how they might reuse materials, which formerly headed for the skip.

“All the gardens have a destination, which is really important,” says Pottage – the show gardens are all being relocated after the show.

Award-winning designer Tom Massey, who has this year designed The Royal Entomological Society Garden, predicts: “Reuse of waste materials is going to be a big thing.”

He uses crushed construction waste in his show garden, including crushed bricks and concrete to create a textured, aesthetic backdrop for the planting along with deadwood. “These waste materials are really good habitat for insects,” he points out.

Plants

People will be encouraged to grow native plants, from hazel to cow parsley, while those seeking colour may go for irises, which are prevalent at this year’s show. There’s also a resurgence of common yew (Taxus baccata) and other familiar plants including a cloud pine, Eleagnus ‘Quicksilver’

Drought-tolerant plants are also being pushed – some 55% of perennials in the show gardens are drought-tolerant, almost double that of last year, including fennel, salvia and cistus.

Weeds

Dandelions and other weeds feature in some of the gardens. Chelsea gold medallist Cleve West notes: “People get their knickers in a twist about weeds but they are the pioneer plants that stitch everything together.

“It’s just getting people to understand that all the things we kill with herbicides and pesticides can look quite beautiful,” West adds. “Just be more tolerant, and if you have a space where you can let nature take its course, it’s got to be good for wildlife and insects.”

Massey adds: “Dandelions are an early source of pollen and nectar for bees – and insects are in mass decline, so we need to be more considerate in the way we manage and maintain our gardens.”

Sculpture

“We are seeing nature becoming the sculpture,” says Duff, citing designer Sarah Price’s Nurture Landscapes Garden Mediterranean cloud pine. There are pillows of yew in the Memoria and GreenAcres Transcendence Garden.

Nods to the Royal Family abound, from bronze bust of the King in A Garden of Royal Reflection and Celebration, which features some of the Windsor family’s favourite plants including roses and camassia, plus several crowns featuring flora and fauna.

Standing at just under 7m is the biggest driftwood sculpture ever displayed at Chelsea, a Wyvern dragon perched on a tree, the centrepiece of sculptor James Doran-Webb’s exhibit.

And paying homage to the unsung heroines of horticulture at The Monument is the ‘Women in Horticulture’ exhibit honouring the likes of Janaki Ammal, Beth Chatto and Gertrude Jekyll.

Bigging up small spaces

Guy Barter, chief horticulturist for the RHS, says people are likely to be planting bigger trees on their balconies and also using drought-tolerant species. “This year there’s a pollinator section, a wildlife bath, and drought-resistant plants.”

Innovative, Eco-Friendly and Smart: Check Out the Gardening Products of the Year

Chelsea garden product of the year

From eco-friendly home composters to super quick pizza ovens and inventive garden lighting, we look at 7 garden products of the year.

Want a composter with a difference? Or a light that doubles as a Bluetooth speaker? Or even a pot or seed tray made from bamboo?

These are just some of the finalists for the RHS Chelsea Product of the Year title which may take your fancy in the coming months, whether you’re looking for the practical, the sustainable or the high tech.

Here are 7 clever products which have impressed the RHS judges:

Chelsea garden product of the year

1. Obelisk Composter and Obelisk (£39 composter, £59 obelisk, wilstone.com)

This ingenious invention launching at RHS Chelsea Flower Show features a galvanised mild steel compost bin which you put directly on to your flower bed or in your vegetable patch, and an elegant obelisk which goes over it which you can use as a support for anything from climbing beans to sweet peas or clematis.

You scoop compostable waste directly into the drum and the resulting compost inside then feeds the growing plants directly into their roots without you having to lift or carry the compost anywhere.

Chelsea garden product of the year

2. Cuba LED lantern and combined Bluetooth speaker (£249, lightinnovation.com)

Shed a little light on your patio and enjoy music at the same time with this new lantern and combined Bluetooth speaker, which will be available from the end of May.

It’s highly portable and can be used indoors or out, recharging from 0 to 100% in six hours. The dimmable 7 watt LED light will work for up to eight hours on one charge and the lantern will connect to any Bluetooth-enabled device, from a phone to a tablet.

Chelsea garden product of the year

3. Swan Watering Can (£8, madewithhusk.com)

With an emphasis on sustainability, this swan-shaped indoor watering can (to be launched on May 20) is fully biodegradable and made from 75% waste bamboo powder collected directly from farms. Testing has shown that the product can last up to seven years, although this was based on a pot that had been left outside, so it’s likely that if kept indoors, it will last longer.

Chelsea garden product of the year

4. Hotbin mini (£150, hotbincomposting.com)

Following in the footsteps of the award-winning Hotbin which can transform your food and garden waste into rich compost within 30-90 days, its smaller sister, the Hotbin mini (launching at Chelsea) does the same thing but is easier to house in smaller gardens.

It reaches temperatures of 40-60C which allows the efficient composting of more types of waste, more quickly. All food and garden waste can be added in, including cooked food, small bones and perennial weeds.

It’s also sealed well enough, with a bio-filter in the lid, to stop odours that can attract rats and flies. Add a bulking agent such as wood chippings to aid the process.

Chelsea garden product of the year

5. ‘Grande’ Plant Belles (from £53, will be available to order from Chelsea plantbelles.co.uk)

To mark the company’s 10th year of trading, it is launching three new ‘grande’ plant belles, elegant but robust steel wire frames to support larger freestanding herbaceous plants, unruly shrub roses and other floppy heavy headed shrubs like Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’.

The new taller, wider and heavier plant belles are inspired by the Sissinghurst method of training shrub roses, offering needy plants support once grown through, but also give the gardener the chance to prune and train shrubby plants in creative ways, by looping and tying branches back to the structure.

Chelsea garden product of the year

6. Ooni Koda Gas-Powered Outdoor pizza oven (£244.99, uk.ooni.com)

If you love eating pizza in the open air and you don’t want to wait too long, you may invest in this smart, sleek pizza oven which you can assemble in seconds, place on your patio and have a pizza ready in 60 seconds.

Flip open the foldable legs, put the stone baking board into the oven, connect it to a gas tank and pre-heat the oven for 15 minutes. It reaches temperatures of up to 500C, which is why it can cook your pizza so quickly. It has a clean, streamlined silhouette paired with one-touch gas ignition for easy, convenient outdoor cooking.

Chelsea garden product of the year

7. Bamboo Pots and Seed Trays (£3.99-£6.99, www.haxnicks.co.uk)

Continuing the eco-friendly theme and the war on plastics, these bamboo pots and seed trays from Haxnicks are made from bamboo and rice, can be used indoors or outdoors and are reputed to last for five years or more. They’re also biodegradable and compostable, so give a feelgood factor to gardeners who really care about their environment.

×
Find a Property
M
Country & Equestrian