There are six All About Plants gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023, including gardens from Jane Porter, Camellia Taylor, and Alexa Ryan-Mills.
Looking for information on Chelsea 2024? Here's the All About Plants gardens list for Chelsea 2024
As with last year, many of the All About Plants gardens are funded by the recent initiative, Project Giving Back.
Each garden has been designed in collaboration with a UK charity to reflect their individual causes using a minimum of 80 per cent planting, highlighting the vital role specialist growers play within UK horticulture. Following the show, all of the gardens will live on at the charities’ chosen locations, from Glasgow to Kent.
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RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 All About Plants Gardens
Choose Love Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Choose Love
Designer: Jane Porter
Contractor: Stone Inspired
Contact: @plantyjane
A visit to a refugee camp in Samos, Greece, earlier this year informed Jane Porter’s vision for this garden, inspired by refugee journeys. “I felt like I really had to see for myself and have an understanding of the situation if I am going to be speaking to this about people,” Jane explains. She was able to see first hand how important garden spaces are to displaced people, and even brought back found materials from the camp to incorporate into her garden’s sculpture.
All the stone in the garden is Purbeck limestone, giving the dry, bleached feel of the Mediterranean, but it is the herbs that are at the centre of Jane’s design. They represent the plants refugees see as they travel from east to west: all drought tolerant, resilient enough to survive in coastal exposed areas and ideal for full sun. Rather than relying on the species and cultivars usually found in British gardens, Jane has created a more unexpected planting palette with the likes of Cretan dittany (Origanum dictamnus) with its soft hairy foliage, the purple flowers of lavender-leaved sage (Salvia lavandulifolia) and mounds of compact thyme (Thymus vulgaris ‘Compactus’).
Jane wanted the walls of the garden to feel part of the garden, rather than a boundary, so she chose an earth-bagged construction, echoing the technique used to construct dwellings in refugee camps. “A family can build their own shelter with this method using materials on site. They are earthquake proof and insulated, as well as sustainable. It’s almost like a continuation of the ground rather than a barricade,” she explains.
After the show, the garden will find a home at Good Food Matters, a community garden and kitchen based in Croydon, London.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
1. Drought-tolerant herbs from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Mediterranean fill the garden, including kerosene bush (
) and dwarf Schmidt wormwood (
‘Nana’).
2. The herbs are overlooked by a Persian ironwood (
) tree whose characterful growth has been twisted sideways by wind.
3. A wind-activated sculpture has been commissioned for the garden from Ivan Black, a sculptor who specialises in kinetic works.
4. A path constructed from Purbeck limestone flows through the space, representing a dry stream bed - a way of representing water (and its shortage) in the garden.
5. Seating made from boulders echoes the difficult journeys refugees take across Europe, where stones are used to stop people camping: here, they offer a place to rest.
The Natural Affinity Garden for Aspens
Designer Camellia Taylor.
Sponsor Project Giving Back for Aspens Charities.
Contractor The Outdoor Room.
Theme A sensory garden.
Contact thegardentaylor.com
The work of charity Aspens in supporting those with autism and learning difficulties was key to designer Camellia Taylor, who trained in psychology before beginning her horticultural career, and whose designs aim to connect people to nature. “I’ve tried to bring the elements of my training together,” she says. “The design is based on neurons in the brain and their aesthetic similarity to how roots grow.” From a central ‘nucleus’ seating area, walls rise and drop down as they flow out to represent plants’ roots or neurons. Wheelchair-friendly pathways mimic tracks in a lane with grass running down the centre. The planting is sensory, for taste, hearing and touch, and water around the seating area provides calm and tranquillity.
School Food Matters Garden
Designer Harry Holding.
Sponsor Project Giving Back for School Food Matters.
Contractor Landscape Associates.
Theme Healthy eating for children.
Contact harryholding.co.uk
This is Harry Holding’s first Chelsea garden – in fact, it is his first ever show garden – but he has been working in the area of growing food with schoolchildren since he was in school himself, so a partnership with charity School Food Matters, which campaigns for healthy, sustainable food in schools, is a perfect match.
“The inspiration for the design was the awe and wonder of nature you feel when you're a child, drawn from memories of things like Alice in Wonderland and those sorts of wacky landscapes,” Harry explains.
The features of the garden relate to the fundamental elements that are required for food production, with soil represented by curving rammed earth walls, adorned with painted quotes from schoolchildren about food. Harry is constructing these experimental walls before the show and transporting them to site on a truck, in what is sure to be a nerve-wracking journey to the Royal Hospital grounds.
The walls create a sanctuary space around a shallow pool of water, a seasonally wet pool which would fill in winter. There are also boulders to clamber over and a child-sized path that meanders through the space. However, the planting, which was grown by Hortus Loci, is the most prominent feature. “More than 80 per cent of the garden is planted, and 80 per cebt of those plants are edible,” says Harry, “from fruit trees to rhubarb, artichokes, asparagus, fennel and various herbs.” These ‘edimentals’ are run through with ribbons of colourful pollinator plants, including achilleas, salvias, nasturtiums and California poppies. The beds are also mounded up to create drier areas to showcase drought-tolerant and climate-resilient cultivars.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
1 Rammed earth walls covered in quotes from children, which curve around the central area
2 Edimentals form a large part of Harry’s planting – ornamental but edible plants including perennial vegetables, herbs, roots and flowers.
3 A seasonally wet pool which would dry out in summer and fill in wet winters
4 Boulders and a narrow path to add a sense of fun and adventure for children
Find out more about Harry Holding’s show garden on the Talking Gardens Chelsea podcast.
The Sadler’s Wells East Garden
Designer: Alexa Ryan-Mills
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Sadler’s Wells
Contractor: Big Fish Landscapes
Theme: The next generation of dancers and dance lovers, especially hip hop
Contact: alexaryanmills.co.uk
This garden celebrates the next generation of dancers and dance lovers, as Sadler’s Wells East prepares to open in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park next year. It is especially inspired by hip hop.
"Sadler’s Wells was my imagined client for my final project at London College of Garden Design, where I studied for their diploma in planting design," explains Alexa. "When the opportunity came up to apply for funding for a Chelsea garden via Project Giving Back, I already had a good concept, connecting dance and planting. Two years on what was once an idea on paper has developed into a garden at one the best (if not the best!) garden shows in the world. I definitely didn’t see that coming!"
She adds: "One of the things I was most excited about was bringing a little bit of east London to uptown Chelsea. I’ve lived there for the last 10 years and the manufacturing heritage of Stratford, where Sadler’s Wells East will open next year, inspires the garden’s materials. I’m really pleased we’ve been able to use beautiful reclaimed brick and timber in the garden. They bring such a sense of narrative to the space and really place it in east London."
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR
1 Plants as performers – trees and shrubs cut beautiful figures, while perennials and annuals echo the layers, patterns, twirls and shapes of dance.
2 Furniture made from timber that was formerly cladding from a housing estate in Stratford. "The timber was removed in the wake of changes to legislation following the fire at Grenfell Tower," explains Alexa. "I couldn’t believe it when the team at the reclamation yard showed it to me."
3 Wire cut brick for our paths from around the corner from the Olympic Park. "There were many brickfields in this part of the capital and the Victorian bricks we walk past everyday feel like pieces of the labour of east Londoners."
4 A mural by Bro Ben features hip hop dancers and Jonzi D, one of the foremost advocates of UK hip hop dance and theatre and Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells.
The Talitha Arts Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Talitha Arts
Contractor: Landcraft
The Teapot Trust Elsewhere Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Teapot Trust
Designers: Nicola Semple & Susan Begg
Contractor: Stewart Landscape Construction Ltd
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