RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024 is a year of feel-good gardens

First thoughts on RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024? It’s the most difficult show to review in many years. There isn’t one big obvious trend or takeaway, or a phrase that, however pat, sums up the jist of the show, like last year’s ‘weeds and rubble’. Yes, there’s a fair bit of rusty metal here and there, several sets of large, slabby, stone steps, some very interesting structures and a whole lotta irises… but nothing that makes this reviewer comfortable enough to say: “It’s the year of the [insert wildly overblown descriptor here]”.

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This year, all the show garden designs are different from each other, but at the same time, none of them are so, so different that they are show-defining, in the way that, say, that controversial Best in Show-winning quarry garden by Scape Design/James Basson was.

The Octavia Hill Garden by Blue Diamond with the National Trust at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024. Designed by Ann-Marie Powell and the Blue Diamond team. © Neil Hepworth

The trends that can be identified are, pleasingly, what we predicted in our preview of the show here on Gardens Illustrated – lots of water in streams, ponds and pools, and real sustainability credentials in the construction.

Will this year's gardens disappoint people of a more progressive nature?

The planting is defiantly colourful in gardens such as Ann-Marie Powell’s design for The National Trust and Matthew Childs’ for the Terrence Higgins Trust, with bright clashing combinations, and Miria Harris has sweeps of blocked colour from rusty oranges through to pinks. But on Ula Maria’s shady woodland-style garden for Muscular Dystrophy UK, there is a more calming mix of pinks, purples, blues and whites; and Tom Stuart-Smith’s has a soothingly pale palette of white and yellow. There are pine trees on some gardens and birches on others, hazels and koelreuterias, alders and willows. It’s a struggle to pull out any real common threads from the design features or planting.

The gardens at Chelsea 2024

But, stepping back to see the big picture, one thing is clear. The gardens may all be different, BUT they are all gardens. Not evocations of a ruined house or a beaver dam or a mountain in Korea – all of which I loved, by the way – but gardens through and through. Good old-fashioned spaces for outside houses and for humans to cultivate plants, you know? Perhaps this shouldn’t be so notable for a garden show, but compared to the experimental spaces of recent years, it seems like a return to normal service for Chelsea. This will utterly delight many visitors, but will it disappoint others of a more progressive nature?

I don’t believe so. There is still ambition and experimentation here, but it is tempered by a clear desire to make these spaces beautiful and enjoyable to be in - quietly breathtaking rather than brazenly gasp-inducing. The standard and complexity of the designs and builds across the main show gardens is noticeably high, so, whether you like a design or not, you cannot deny the excellence of its execution and success in achieving its aims. I didn’t envy the judges choosing the Best in Show award.

But when it came to that big prize, I was willing to stick my neck out and say, like many others that it was a tale of two Toms. Tom Stuart-Smith and his studio team have crafted an exquisite garden for the National Garden Scheme, an update on the traditional cottage garden with exuberant woodland planting, a stunning oak cleft shed, the most incredible wizened, spreading hazel trees and a double stone sink that would make any gardener giddy. It’s so good, it might even make me like rhododendrons.

The WaterAid Garden. Designed by Tom Massey and Je Ahn at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024. © Neil Hepworth

Tom Massey’s design for Water Aid, created with architect Je Ahn, is a very different, very modern beast, but just as noteworthy, with a sculptural structure in winding rusty steel forming the central focal point. It defines the space without being heavy or domineering, somehow perfectly in scale, and a touch of romance is created by the single tree thrusting up through the opening at its centre. Metal walkways float above the pond and the planting, chunky timber seats and stacks of stone ground the space, and worthy, but still pretty, planting flushes through the gaps in between.

In the end, the big accolade actually went to young female designer Ula Maria with the tranquil forest bathing garden for Muscular Dystrophy UK. Deceptive in its simplicity, it was perfectly balanced, with exquisite planting and lovely details. With its flint and bungaroosh walls, beautiful large water feature and 50 trees offering delicate dappled shade, it was a triumph. Even though it was my favourite garden at the show, it was a surprise when the award was announced, and it really should not have been. Perhaps it was simply that it was Ula's first garden at the show that made me think the judges wouldn't swing that way - but I was wrong, and I'm happy that I was. Ula now joins the short list of female designers who have been presented with this prize.

So it is a Chelsea of surprises and shocks, but also one that celebrates the joy of gardening. All three of these gardens, and most of the others on Main Avenue, feel good to look at, and wonderful to be in, should you be lucky enough to be invited on. And isn’t that all that any of us really want from a garden?

RHS Chelsea Flower Show review: Back to normal service in a year of feel-good gardens

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