Flower Gazing at Malvern Autumn Show 2025

The Chatty Gardener blog celebrated its 10th anniversary last week. It started with a post on the Malvern Autumn Show and so it’s apt that this week I’ve been back to the event that marks the end of my garden show year.

Naturally, the Malvern Autumn show means dahlias. There were displays by the National Dahlia Society, blooms in the amateur contests and this rather lovely combination on the Pheasant Acre Plants’ stand. None of them were any good for my resolve to curb my dahlia buying habit.

Pheasant Acre Plants were also showing their rather impressive collection of gladioli. It’s something I grow very little of – just the one variety so far – but the colours on display were rather good.

Despite the challenging summer, the nurseries in the Floral Marquee put on a beautiful show with plenty to tempt.

Green JJam Nurseries’ gold medal-winning stand had a very delicate euphorbia that caught my eye. Unlike its somewhat beefier cousins, this isn’t frost hardy so would need winter protection. Green JJam had it in a container where it made a beautiful, frothy display.

Michaelmas daisies, or asters, or whatever they have changed their name to now are another feature of the Malvern Autumn Show. While several stands had odd varieties, the best display was undoubtedly Old Court Nurseries, which holds a National Collection at its Picton Garden.

The autumn stars were teamed with succulents – another passion of nursery owners, Helen and Ross. It was another gold medal-winning display.

This combination appealed – ‘Snowdrift’ and woolly thyme in a container on the Kitchen Garden Plants’ display. The contrast of leaf shape was really striking.

I have a love/hate relationship with solidago. There’s one in my garden – can’t remember if I was foolish enough to plant it – and it is a thug that spreads rapidly. However, there’s no doubt it is great for pollinators and a useful bit of late colour in the borders.

This solidago – on the Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants display looks a more refined variety, which evidently isn’t as tall as our native golden rod. Perhaps it will be worth trying.

What I do need is more salvias as they do well on my sandy soil. Middleton Nurseries had some beauties and these two in particular appealed. An autumn job is looking closely at the borders and working out how to plug the gaps caused by summer drought deaths.

If the Malvern Autumn Show brought my garden show year to a close, for Mike Clare it marked the end of his working life as a nurseryman. The owner of Potash Nursery in Suffolk has now retired after 27 years of showing – he originally worked in IT – and the exhibitors gathered in the floral marquee to wish him well ahead of the show gates opening.

The nursery, which he’s hoping to sell, specialised in pelargoniums and fuchsias and Mike’s final display at Malvern showcased scented leaved pelargoniums.

“I’ve made so many friends doing this,” he said “among exhibitors and repeat customers.”

Although he had exhibited at many shows across the country, Malvern, he said, was his favourite site.

“You cannot beat seeing those hills when you turn up.”

And he’s planning to take a few of his favourite fuchsias and pelargoniums with him into retirement: “I can’t be without them.”

Flowers aside, the other main feature of the Malvern Autumn Show is the giant veg and there were some world record entries this year. This whopping 111kg marrow grown by Mark Baggs was just one of the six new Guiness World Records set at the show.

Given how difficult it has to grow veg in a summer of high heat and low rainfall, the entries were all the more impressive.

And not just in the giant veg contest. The entries in the amateur classes were also astoundingly good. I just wish I’d had such a good season.

You can read about more of my visits to shows here.

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