This year's Balcony and Container category features ten small space gardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025.
The Balcony and Container category gives emerging designers a chance to create a small space at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and this year the theme of wellness pervades all the gardens featured. The gardens should inspire those who have the smallest of outdoor spaces, with carbon sequestration, water recycling and wildlife gardening taking centre stage.
This year the Balcony and Container Gardens will appear as usual along Serpentine Avenue.
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The full list of Balcony and Container gardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025
A Space to Read Balcony Garden sponsored by Viking
Sponsor: Viking
Designer: Freddie Strickland and Ben Gifford
An outdoor garden reading space is the inspiration for this balcony garden designed by Freddie Strickland and Ben Gifford, featuring armchair style seats and subtle lighting.
With a verdant planting scheme, and a large tree used to conceal the boundaries of the balcony, the space should transport you to a quiet, cool place that's perfect for disappearing into a book.
Geranium sylvaticum ‘Album’ is repeated throughout the design, as a reliable and beautiful
perennial with a long season of interest, while Bergenia ciliata add an unusual texture to the
planting with their deeply veined and hairy leaves.
C6
Sponsor: Navium Marine Ltd
Designer: Joshua Fenton
Contractor: Fenton Gardens Ltd
A tiny version of a very well focused environmental garden, which features water recycling and carbon sequestration, while also supporting wildlife and being a calming and sophisticated space.
This small space is able to sequester over 1200kg of carbon, promoting three ways in which gardeners can do this in any space. The use of biochar improves the soil quality whilst also sequestering carbon for up to a thousand years. The garden incorporates planters made of charred oak, locking carbon up for the lifespan of the planter, an estimated eighty years. The planting of fast-growing trees and herbaceous perennials gives the designer the opportunity to harvest the new growth and convert it to biochar, and in doing so, sequestering the carbon in the plant material. Expect hazel and apple trees, wisteria and miscanthus alongside lush greens and blues.
Komorebi Garden
Sponsor: Hamptons
Designer: Masa Taniguchi
Contractor: Garden Club London
Komorebi is a Japanese word, used to describe the way sunlight pierces through a tree canopy and the dappled shade it creates.
Designed to encourage meditation and contemplation, there will be Betula pendula trees, Fargium japonicum and Disporum longistylum ‘Night Heron’, while traditional Japanese tea ceremony materials, like charcoal, are used to improve the air quality and emphasise the sense of tranquility within the garden.
Secret Base – The Another Green Room
Sponsor: Glion Group
Designer: Jun Ishihara
Contractor: Daikanyama Kadan Co.
We are interested to see that Jun Ishihara, son of the much-loved Chelsea regular and multi-Gold-winning Japanese designer Kazuyuki Ishihara, is stepping out on his own in this category this year with Secret Base – The Another Green Room garden.
This garden has been designed as a traditional Japanese tsuboniwa, or courtyard garden, inspired by biophilic design to harmonise with nature. It's created as a secret hideaway, so visitors will find themselves immersed in trees, with the soothing soundtrack of running water.
The garden will feature a number of deciduous trees, and a variety of seasonal plants to create year-round interest. Maple trees, Ekianthus lour, Nandina and Dryopteris eryhrosora have been chosen by the designer to evoke a Japanese ambience and to recreate the essence of traditional Japanese garden design.
MS Amlin Peace of Mind Garden
Sponsor: MS Amlin
Designer: Hamzah-Adam Desai
Contractor: Triston Dominique
The psychology of colour takes centre stage in this garden, reflecting the designer's journey into horticulture and his discovery of the positive impact colour therapy with plants could have on his mental wellbeing and mood. The planting has been designed to reference a colour wheel with complementary
planting principles applied, to show what can be achieved with containers to create a garden
border effect in a small space.
Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ has red-tinted orange flowers, with a long flowering season from late spring to autumn, while Euphorbia x martini ‘Rudolph’ is a striking evergreen with leathery dark green leaves, which develops bright red blush tips in autumn for winter interest, and blooms lime-green flowers in spring and summer.
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Room to Breathe Hospital Garden for the TSA
Supporter: The Tuberous Sclerosis Association (TSA)
Designer: Jen Donnelly and Catherine Gibbon
A restorative retreat for parents and caregivers of those living with tuberous sclerosis, this garden has been designed to help caregivers recharge.
A cocoon-like feature chair cradles visitors to the garden, offering a warm embrace and a sense of security, and an angled pergola evokes the subtle disorientation carers face, reflecting their need for realignment in challenging moments. The planting palette features calming greens to promote tranquillity, with splashes of burgundy amidst the greenery to represent carers’ resilience through adversity and whites serving as a guiding light through darker times.
Fettercairn Wilderness Retreat
Sponsor: Fettercairn
Designers: Sonia Kamel, Sally Giles, Helier Bowling
Contractor: RAAFT
This balcony garden is inspired by the wilderness of the Scottish landscape, with wild and verdant planting reminiscent of the Cairngorms landscape. This small space aims to embody a reminder that nature's extremities - wind, cold water and exposing conditions - can be bracingly beneficial for your health and happiness.
The colours of the Cairngorms in spring are reflected in the planting of the garden, with the green grasses of the grasslands, the pinks of the heathers and Silene, and the yellow of the Cytisus evoking the Scottish heath.
The ME+EM City Garden
Sponsor: ME+EM
Designers: Caroline and Peter Clayton
Contractor: Phil Sutton Landscapes
Detox from technology with this small space design, which is planted with fragrant plants and blooms for cut flowers.
The garden will utilise a resilient planting design to cope with increased climatic extreme and will be filled with plants perfect for growing your own cut flowers, such as sweetpeas.
Ornamental grasses will also feature heavily, with layered grasses planted around the daybed to catch the evening light.
Navium Marine: Blue Mind Garden
Sponsor: Navium Marine
Designers: Ashleigh Aylett
Contractor: Hortus London
This balcony garden explores our deep connection to water as humans and the positive impact it brings to our wellbeing. The design reimagines how the aspects of water can be integrated into small spaces to create a sense of serenity in an urban environment.
The garden utilises resilient coastal planting in muted blue and green tones. Drought-tolerant plants such as Sea buckthorn and Artemisia highlight the shift towards plants that thrive in tough conditions and require less maintenance and water. The garden also features The Olla irrigation system, an ancient technique that gently releases water to plant roots.
Bees for Development - Making Life Better With Bees
Sponsor: Bees for Development
Designers: Jenny Rafferty, Frantisek Zika, Jim Goodman
Contractor: EH Thorne Ltd
This garden is inspired by Africa and the connection between bees, people and biodiversity, and designed as an urban retreat that is a haven for pollinators. The garden features traditional English and African beehives, creatively integrated to highlight the role of bees in addressing biodiversity loss, climate change and poverty.
An oak trunk near the entrance showcases traditional African beehives, weaving cultural heritage into a contemporary setting. Vibrant, pollinator-friendly plants — such as Agapanthus, Kniphofia and Gleditsia triacanthos ‘Rubylace’ — thrive in peat-free compost, ensuring colour and nectar throughout the seasons. Nasturtium provides abundant colour through peach and cream tones.
