Last year it was Sarah Price. At RHS Chelsea 2024, it was Ann-Marie Powell’s garden that kept drawing me back.
It has superb planting, with colours that flow through the space, offset by beautiful hand-carved benches that cried out to be touched.
‘The Octavia Hill Garden by Blue Diamond with the National Trust’ celebrates a social reformer, and a founder of the NT, who believed in the benefits of nature and fought to protect green space.
Imagined as the transformation of a brownfield site, the garden is designed to promote wellbeing – both physical and mental.
And just when I thought I’d photographed everything of interest, I spotted these poppies and had to stop again.
Now, I must admit that at first I was unsure about Tom Stuart-Smith’s ‘The National Garden Scheme Garden’. Brave, yes, with its very restricted colour palette of mainly white and green but encountering it in the blazing heat of late Sunday morning was not the best introduction.
Seeing it in the soft light of early morning, I was won over. Set under beautiful hazel trees, the garden is full of herbaceous perennials in a relaxed, natural planting style.
There’s definitely been a move towards more sustainable gardens in recent years – many of the gardens at RHS Chelsea 2024 are heading to new homes after the show.
This year’s show even has a garden made from key elements of gardens from past shows, including Tom Massey’s Islamic-inspired fountain from his 2018 ‘The Lemon Tree Trust Garden’.
Elsewhere, other gardens are also making use of repurposed and salvaged items. The gabions that are used as planters on ‘The Pulp Friction – Growing Skills Garden’ in the All About Plants section have been filled with rubble, including some pieces found on the Chelsea show site and others from Nottingham where the garden will eventually go.
Will Dutch, who designed it with Tin-Tin Azure-Marxen, explained that other landscaping materials were also salvaged – the paving is from Yorkstone offcuts that would otherwise have gone to waste while the boundary fence has been made from waste wood that normally ends up in wood fibre or burned as a biomass fuel.
I particularly liked the seats that he’d fashioned from wood salvaged from St Katherine’s Dock in London.
Recycled materials are at the heart of Naomi Slade and Ed Barsley’s ‘Flood Re: The Flood Resilient Garden’. This looks at how with a little careful planning you can still grow a wide range of plants even in a garden that floods.
The secret, Naomi told me, was to choose where to grow things. Tricks include mounding up the soil so that things that require drier conditions are on ground that drains more readily. Water-tolerant plants can then be grown at lower levels.
Growing veg in raised beds will also protect them from any floods, especially as flood water can often be contaminated.
Harvesting rainwater through a series of rain chains and repurposed galvanised troughs helps to store water for drought but also feeds into a pond in the centre of the garden.
The garden is designed for the average plot – be that behind a semi or terraced house – and it has plenty of seats to encourage you to sit out and enjoy it.
Water and our use of it is also the inspiration behind Tom Massey and Je Ahn’s ‘The WaterAid Garden’.
A dramatic rain water harvesting pavilion dominates the garden above varied planting.
It wouldn’t be Chelsea without Japanese designer Kazuuyuki Ishihara and he has a Sanctuary Garden that is his ‘ultimate domestic garden’.
It has his trademark use of moss and tumbling water but it was the Iris siberica ‘Tropic Night’ that caught my eye.
And often it was the plants that made their mark on me at RHS Chelsea 2024. I loved the way the flower colours picked up the tones of hard landscaping on Penelope Walker’s ‘The Panathlon Joy Garden’ in the All About Plants section.
It was a mix of beautifully combined pastel shades and then some truly vibrant colours in the seating and walls.
Plants and seating are also beautifully co-ordinated in ‘The Boodles National Gallery Garden’ by Catherine MacDonald.
There’s a soft, frothy feel to the planting on the Bowel Research UK Microbiome Garden, designed by Chris Hull and Sid Hill.
Chris explained that 90 per cent of the plants used in the ‘meadow’ were edible although they had planted half of it with grasses to give the airy feel.
Meanwhile, it was good to see veg included in ‘Planet Good Earth’ by Betongpark and Urban Organic.
The balcony gardens are always difficult to photograph without the plants looking as though they are in jail!
This was one I did like – and managed to capture. ‘Children With Cancer UK Raines Repurposed’ is designed by Thomas Clarke and uses mainly salvaged and repurposed materials.
In contrast, ‘The Water Saving Garden’ by Sam Procter in the container garden section is a contemporary space with lots of ideas for using water wisely, including slim water butts that can fit into a corner and rain sensors.
I liked the modern water feature, set amidst the planting.
And finally, on what turned out to be one of Chelsea’s hottest press days for a few years, the ‘mgr Changing Tides Garden’ by Lucy Mitchell in the container gardens section was perfectly timed and the deckchair was very tempting.
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