AWAY: RHS Chelsea 2025

Pictures of Plants and Why I Won't Go Next Year

The thing is, I’m always just in it for the plants.

As I discovered on my day-long RHS ‘So You Want To Be A Garden Designer’ course last summer, I can’t get excited about 80% of garden design. I don’t look at a landscape and think ‘gosh, I wish I could move that hill’. I can’t get excited about the nuances of concrete. I’ve almost never liked a garden sculpture.

I’m really in it for the plants. Ok, not just the individual plants themselves but the planting.

This remains true even when the brief a garden designer must meet is very worthy.

And everything at the show is very worthy now. Anne-Marie Powell wrote a brilliantly honest post about the conflicts and contradictions of the current iteration of the show (free to read):

Chelsea is transforming – from brand promotion to cause advocacy, from temporary displays to gardens with permanent homes. Part of me applauds this evolution; another part misses the sheer extravagance of the glory days. The contradiction between preaching sustainability while lorries deliver temporary gardens isn’t lost on me, especially when communities nearby lack permanent green space.

And the thing is, Chelsea Flower Shower is ridiculously extravagant whether the plants in the show gardens are drought-tolerant or not.

Tickets generally cost over £100, half the attendees (it seems) are there enjoying a corporate hospitality package, it is easier to get your hands on a glass of champagne than a cup of water. The more expansive the retail offering is (and this year the show seemed to me to be 90% retail) the more the ‘flower’ in ‘flower show’ becomes a fig leaf (heh) for the show’s true, capitalist intentions.

And at each show garden I visited I was given a sombre, lengthy explanation about biochar, or salvaged bollards, or growing in sand, or whatever.

And the thing is, it is not that I’m hostile to the importance of climate science or any of these things, it just all seemed to have jumped the shark this year.

The chickpea plant in the Gates Foundation garden must be the most photographed legume since records began. But if I wanted to be preached to about the importance of saving the plant I would turn up to the next local Extinction Rebellion meeting which would be far cheaper and would require less endurance of the MMM (middle-aged, middle-class mob).

I just thought - quite honestly - that the show as a whole was a bit of a yawn. That’s the honest truth.

I’m in it for the plants.

You know from my post about Jo Thompson’s garden that it was the plants and their purpose that I found poignant. I stand by it. In that case, Jo was making an offering of abundant beauty to women with little (sometimes nothing) of their own. That, to me, is the power of plants and of planting. It says ‘here, nature is for everyone. It need not cost you much, but it’s value is enormous’. She said it with plants.

I feel I should include a disclaimer about how of course all the designers are highly skilled and work very hard etc. It isn’t their fault. But to quote an older gent I overheard out of the midsts of the MMM: “it’s just foxgloves, foxgloves, foxgloves”.

Of course it is May and there are certain plants that are at their best in May. And if you hold a flower show every year in the same week in May, a lot of those same flowers will appear. But I thought the older gent’s grumbled complaint succinctly expressed my feeling. Just a bit… meh.

Aside from some of the plants, there wasn’t much else I was enthusiastic about. The multi-stemmed tree trend is going nowhere. Neither is the Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ which appeared everywhere like a persistent weed. Some of the styling choices were startlingly unattractive (the Chelsea Pensioner cushions? Bizarre.) But - BUT - all of that said, here are some pictures of the plants I did like.