The must-see event of the year for keen gardeners and horticulturalists all around the world, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024 is back and fast approaching!
With a variety of glorious showcase gardens and designs to explore, this year’s show is set to be the greenest event so far. With sustainability at the forefront of this year’s show, there will be a large focus on environmentally conscious gardens as designers demonstrate how garden design can be used to significantly reduce your carbon footprint. Taking place from 21st-25th May, let’s take a sneak peek into the latest garden trends, innovative ideas and planting styles that we are due to be seeing shortly at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024.
Image Credit: Lucy Vail Floristry: Another Blooming Heatwave. Installation. RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023.
Showcase gardens
With spectacular sanctuary gardens, bespoke balcony gardens and flourishing feature gardens, this year’s show is set to include a lineup of utterly divine and environmentally conscious designs. Let’s take a look into a few of the stimulating designs that we’re due to see this year!
The first show garden to capture our attention was the enticing and accessible Forest Bathing Garden designed by Ula Maria for Muscular Dystrophy UK. A beautifully sculpted forest-inspired design, this garden was crafted to provide a quiet and peaceful outdoor space for patients suffering from muscle wasting conditions, but for their families and clinicians too. Enhancing a connection between the human and natural world, this garden has been shaped to awaken the senses whilst evoking the sensation of a relaxing forest ambience.
A striking sanctuary garden designed by Holly Johnston, The Bridgerton Garden is an exciting design that we can’t wait to see. Inspired by character Penelope Featherington from the hit Netflix series Bridgerton, this ornate and tranquil design encompasses a magical moongate and trickling fountain which leads down into an enchanting sunken seating spot. Using a symbolic planting palette to reflect Penelope’s character development throughout the series, this design has also been crafted with a strong sustainability focus, including features such as drystone walling, reclaimed materials and eco-crete.
Image credit: Muscular Dystrophy UK – Forest Bathing Garden, Show Garden, designed by Ula Maria
Transporting us to an idyllic London courtyard, The Ecotherapy Garden designed by Tom Bannister is a charming container garden that we can’t wait to see this May. With a secluded plunge pool hidden behind a vibrant planting scheme, this glorious garden also includes a series of antique taps that feed into a greater network of pools. Utilising water to frame a heavenly soundscape, wellness and the effectiveness of ecotherapy are based at the foundation of this design. Creating homemade containers from a mixture of coconut coir, Perlite and cement, these containers are wonderfully hard-wearing yet wonderfully sustainable.
Image Credit: The Ecotherapy Garden, Container Garden, designed by Tom Bannister.
Green audit and sustainability
This year, the Chelsea Flower Show has introduced a green audit to be applied to showcase garden designs. Enforced in an attempt to reduce the environmental impact of the show, designs were measured against a series of sustainability standards and designers were given guidance on how to make their designs as sustainable as possible.
To award and recognise how sustainability is being greater introduced into garden designs, the RHS has introduced a new award this year titled “The Environmental Innovation Award”. Available to all the gardens entered into the green audit, this award has been created in order to celebrate how innovative design techniques and environmentally friendly material choices can be used to create striking yet sustainable landscape designs.
Image Credit: The Sue Ryder Grief Kind Garden, All About Plants Garden, Designed by Katherine Holland
The No Adults Allowed Garden
A garden designed by children and for children, this year at the Chelsea Flower Show, the RHS will be featuring the “No Adults Allowed Garden”.
Created with designer Harry Holding, pupils from Sulivan Primary school created a glorious landscape filled with enchanting woodland spaces, flourishing meadows and wetlands. A wonderfully natural space for children to explore and let their imagination run wild, the artwork, sculptures and planting contained within the design further emphasise the importance of garden spaces to children.
Image Credit: RHS No Adults Allowed Garden, Feature Garden, designed by Harry Holding
Balcony & container gardens
This year’s collection of balcony and container gardens continue to prove that you don’t always need acres of outside space to have a glorious garden.
These bijou botanical wonders offer those with more limited opportunities to get outdoors the chance to immerse themselves in nature. Many of themes centre on climate change, ranging from resilient plants to water-saving containers and biodiversity, we’ll be making a beeline to Tomie’s Cuisine the Nobonsai Balcony Garden to see how this enchanting design comes to life.
The garden, designed by Japanese designer Tsuyako Asada, explores sustainability (a topic close to our hearts) through the use of ‘no-waste’ gardening using methods such as re-using pruned twigs and branches to aid soil moisture retention, as well as reducing water consumption. It also explores biodiversity and even manages to incorporate the use of home compost in this tiny wonder.
Image Credit: Tomie’s Cuisine the Nobonsai Balcony Garden, design by Tsuyako Asada
Showcasing a variety of glorious garden designs, trending planting palettes and innovative landscaping ideas, we’re looking forward to heading on down to Chelsea Flower Show 2024. Make sure to grab your tickets here!
