I had a completely different article lined up for this week – and then I realised, belatedly, it’s the Chelsea Flower Show! Can a garden designer really ignore the world’s most prestigious display of garden design talent?
Yes! I have done on many occasions, but this year I’ve decided to join the fray, in my own way, of course…
I have a nostalgic love of the Chelsea Flower Show, but now, I’m not sure how I feel – I definitely don’t love it, that’s for sure. Perhaps, by the end of this piece I’ll be able to crowbar out my true feelings…
But before we get to my thoughts, I will share a video from a lovely lady gardener. Annette, clearly hasn’t lost her love of Chelsea and makes a thoroughly refreshing report, a welcome relief from many of the banal stuff the Beeb broadcast in their misguided attempts to ‘sex gardening up’…
I too love the Mother Nature Sculpture, it is spectacular and the planting perfect for it. I also appreciated aspects of the Parkinson’s Garden.
And here in lies the start of where I started to lose my love of the Chelsea Flower Show many years ago…
Most of what you see, the really good parts, can’t and won’t ever be reproducible in the average garden. And in truth, would look ridiculous if people tried. Chelsea gardens, to a large extent, rely on fancy features, rather than intrinsically good design.
Did you like the squiggly rill in Tom Stuart-Smith’s garden? Beautifully executed, wasn’t it. Now imagine living with it – chances are high you’d turn your ankle the first time you absentmindedly walked across it and can you imagine the work to keep it clean? Most people don’t think of these aspects. As a designer, I do. So I can’t enjoy looking at something that’s both potentially lethal and would be a complete nightmare to maintain.
The very first Chelsea Flower Show I attended I saw a planting combination of Astilbe and Stachys together – it niggled at me immensely. Even fresh out of college I knew one is a marginal plant that needs its feet constantly wet and the other is built to survive drought conditions.
In the last decade there’s been a huge trend at Chelsea for natural looking flower gardens – whilst I do really love that style, there are times when it crosses over into a handful of weeds look. I have that on the new allotment plot I’ve taken on, I don’t want to see it at Chelsea! Also, that trend has been going for ages with virtually every garden trying to recreate naturalistic planting contrasted with lumps of concrete in one form or another – can we have some more variety now?
Faux, Faux, Faux-what?
Everything about the Chelsea Flower Show is faux, so where does one draw the line? The gardens are like lands in the Faraway Tree, there one minute, gone the next. So does it really matter if they are in their essence unachievable fantasy gardens?
If you think about it, every tended garden on the planet is contrived. The mere act of gardening is an interference, albeit in a hopefully aesthetically pleasing way, with nature. So again, where doesn’t one draw the line?
If you’re going to create something contrived, why not go the whole hog and take it as far as you can?
Here in lies the other reason I fell out of love with the Chelsea FS…
For the first exciting ten years of my garden design career I went to the Show religiously. I was like a kid at Christmas. My yearly pilgrimage was one of excitement and expectation.
But after a few years I started to notice that although the gardens were seemingly spectacular, nothing was new, or dare I say it, original. Every year there was the rock garden, the Japanese garden, the show garden with the large metal structures, the show garden with the extravagant water feature, the garden with the really large sculpture etc.
It was formulaic. I was no longer inspired. I’d seen it all before.
I still carried on going for a few years after this realisation had dawned, but not with the same levels of enthusiasm. The last 3 years, I only went because a garden designer friend of mine, Jean, knew one of the stand holders and managed to get us tickets for press day.
We’d be elbow to elbow with all the celebs and within an arm’s reach of royalty. And best of all, no heaving crowds to fight our way through just to catch a glimpse of the gardens. If you’re going to do the Chelsea Flower Show, I highly recommend press day!
I don’t recall the year I last went but it was the one Diarmuid Gavin had created a contentious garden with giant concrete hollow balls you could sit in surrounded by huge lavender bushes and box balls. Unfortunately for him, the lavenders hadn’t flowered in time and he lost out on a coveted Gold Medal.
Diarmuid Gavin’s partner in TV reality show crime, Lawrence Lewellyn-Bowen was flitting around in a purple suit with a white shirt with an over-sized collar and flouncy sleeves. Yes, it was that long ago (I’ve just looked it up 2005)!
It was at these Chelsea FS press days I discovered how incredibly tiny celebrities are. It’s like they all popped out of the same factory – just the right size for TV. And I say that as someone who isn’t exactly tall!
Chelsea is absolutely bursting with celebs on press day – Joanna Lumley, Dame Judy Dench, Gary Lineker, Alan Titchmarsh, Kim Wilde, to name but a few were regular faces. Daytime TV people and a lot of actors I probably should have known the names of but didn’t.
An Ab Fab Encounter
One person did stand out though – actress, June Whitfield. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that I really should get a refund on my poker face. My every thought plays across my face like a TV screen. So when I saw her (years after she’d been on Ab Fab) – I knew, I knew her, but I couldn’t immediately place her.
She held eye contact with me the entire time my brain was trying to process who she was with a mischievous glint in her eyes and at the moment the lightbulb in my brain finally flickered into life, she gave me an all-knowing smile, a little nod and a raised eyebrow. I could almost hear her saying – “Now that didn’t take you long, dear!”
But there was more to it than that. There was a look on her face that also conveyed she appreciated I’d acknowledged her but hadn’t come up to pester and talk. It’s amazing how much can be conveyed in silent expressions. But then that is what makes a great actor, isn’t it…
It was a brief but quite profound moment of connection. There was depth and a sparkle of mischievousness in her eyes – perhaps she recognised a fellow mischief maker. Few celebs actually have star quality when you meet them. Most look right past you, with empty, life-less expressions, akin to waiters in a busy restaurant.
So memories like that and feeling incredibly inspired in the early days of the Chelsea Flower Show tug on my heart, decades later.
But. Here we are, 2026 with another layer of yuck I don’t know how to process.
I can cope with the ridiculously impractical gardens, the financially obscene extravagance, the repetition and lack of meaningful originality in the designs but there’s a new element (well new-ish to me) that leaves me feeling… I don’t even know what word to use. Empty doesn’t quite cover it.
Perhaps desolate is the closest I can find for now…
For years the Chelsea Flower Show has had woke leanings with designers jumping on board like their lives depend upon it. No, that’s not the yuck, I’m talking about – it’s the further infiltration and seeping of the darkness that seems to constantly surround us these days.
My garden is my sanctuary. A place I can fully open my heart to nature’s exquisite creations and be at peace. A place I can, for a time, forget the ugliness of the outside world. A place I can be free from the algorithms and AI.
The Dark Side
Three of the Chelsea Flower Show gardens this year were design by AI. Not assisted, designed by. I think a little part of my soul has just died writing that.
Sure, AI is a fabulous tool for helping people visualise the finished design as I will demonstrate in my next garden design video. But to design the whole thing… I suppose it is inevitable. ‘Progress’, as they like to call it. But in reality – de-humanising humanity.
The darker side of AI, after we’re done playing with it, is just that. De-humanisation.
To create, to have inspiration flowing through every part of your being, is glorious. It also takes a bit of work. Inspiration can be like trying to grasp a feather on a windy day – but once you have, the rewards are feeling so alive and you form a connection with your creation like nothing I can describe with flimsy, ill-fitting words. So I’m not even going to try.
In essence, we will lose what it is to be human if we outsource our creativity.
To create, I believe, is one of the reasons we are here. As well as the whole earth school, soul-journey stuff. People who have never achieved the heights of creativity, as frustrating as it can be, will never have fully lived, expressed themselves or the Divine spark, which runs through all living things. Soon there could be a whole generation who will not even know what creativity is, only computer generated everything.
So that’s where I’m at with the Chelsea Flower Show. Heart-felt nostalgia mixed with heart-numbing emptiness. Which, now that I’ve analysed it, has nothing to do with Chelsea and is merely a reflection of all that is upon us right now. All things considered, I’m usually remarkably upbeat about life – but when the digital darkness seeps into the garden, it’s too close to home to tune out of.
All that aside, one thing the Chelsea Flower Show will always be spectacular at is showing off beautiful plants. Scraping away all of the other stuff, a love and appreciation of plants is something which we can unite on. And whilst I’ve no plans to go back to Chelsea, I can and do appreciate the plants in my own garden. Here’s what I’m blessed with today…
And if you’d like me to show you the simple formula I’ve developed that will enable you to design your garden (yes YOU, not a machine!) – then come and join me for a FREE garden design class https://www.successfulgardendesigner.com/free-classes
Next week there will be a considerably more uplifting piece on how to transform your garden, quickly and easily and have it not only take care of itself, but also you can take it with you when you move!
