My garden show season is now well underway with a visit to RHS Malvern 2025 and Chelsea in but a few days’ time.
The RHS Malvern Spring Festival is like an old friend – my nearest show and one I’ve visited virtually every year it’s run. The setting at the Three Counties Showground is fabulous with the Malvern Hills providing a backdrop to the show gardens.
This year, along with the usual features – show gardens, nursery exhibits and trade stands – there was an indoor plant garden category.
Houseplants have been championed at Malvern for a while but this was the first time enthusiasts were given the chance to show how they could transform a room. It was a real triumph and, hopefully, something that will be repeated.
The judges’ favourite – it won Best in Show – was a clever design showing plants in a wild jungle setting and the same things in a living room. ‘A Reflection of Nature’ by Growtropicals, Claire Lowrie and Ben Newell showed how looking at where plants grow naturally can help growers give them the right conditions indoors.
I liked another gold medal-winning design, ‘Nice Day for a Green Wedding’ by Emma Angold. It had some clever ideas for dressing a wedding reception – or any celebration – using houseplants. They made beautiful and reusable table centrepieces and the dainty place setting plant pots were lovely.
Also picking up a top award was ‘Contemporary Living: A Modern Retreat’ by Botanical Interior Design, another indoor plant garden that I liked. It was stuffed with plants with some great ideas for display.
Out in the show gardens, the problem of water – both too much and too little – was addressed in a couple of gardens.
The Best in Show went to ‘Biosis: Mode of Life’ by Humble-Bee Gardeners and featured an unusual brushwood ‘water tower’ that led down from a green roof and channelled water into a pond.
It had a deliberately ‘undesigned’ look with naturalistic planting, dead wood left for wildlife and recycled materials used for paths.
More typical of the show garden look was ‘The Rain Garden’ by John Howlett. RHS Malvern 2025 was his debut as a show garden designer and he was delighted to get gold.
This Japanese-inspired garden had a contemporary feel with lots of Corten steel and was designed to be flood resistant. A central swale with a steel walkway over it collected excess rainwater as did rain chains that fed into steel troughs.
The planting was lush and predominantly green and was used to soften the steel, such as the white wisteria that wrapped around the metal arch.
Designers Yun Sunmi and Lu Wenjuan created an outdoor exhibition space for RHS Malvern 2025. ‘Garden of the Wind’, which won gold, had beautiful woodland style planting and a realistic tumbling fall of water into a small pool.
A large sail-like structure created ‘wind drawings’ and the garden is headed to an art and cultural institution.
Emily Crowley-Wroe’s ‘Maindee Unlimited: Greening Maindee Gateway Garden’, which won silver, was designed with its end home in mind. It is going to be a public space in the Maindee area of Newport.
As such, the heart of the garden was filled with a curved gabion seat, hand crafted in steel and timber by Simon Probyn. I liked the way planting pockets were included in the top level of the bench.
The planting colour palette was a joyful mix of colours using low maintenance plants and there was good attention to design detail with inset cobbles adding interest to the gravel.
More planting ideas came from Jamie Langlands’ ‘Hedgerow to Home’ feature garden, which showed how using plants that grow naturally can help us choose plants that will thrive and help wildlife.
I’ve got this Verbascum phoenicium ‘Violetta’ in my garden. It self-seeds around but when it’s this pretty, I don’t mind.
Ian McBain was exploring the idea of the magic of the garden at night with his ‘The Sleep in Beauty Garden’, suggesting that we should all try sleeping outdoors. Certainly, the bed was tempting after three long days at the show but it was the planted containers that were catching the attention of visitors.
Bought from eBay, the salvaged steel boxes were a great focal point and set off the planting beautifully. The garden got a silver gilt but can’t have been far off gold.
The Plants at RHS Malvern 2025
When you visit as many gardens and flower shows as I do, it’s often difficult to see much that’s new. Certainly the Floral Marquee had some really good displays from some of our top nurseries but many of the plants were familiar.
I did spot a few things though that I at least hadn’t seen before.
I love Lamprocapnos spectabilis (anyone else still think of it as dicentra?) and I grow the white version. However, this red variety on the Bluebell Cottage Gardens stand was new to me.
Everyone knows Alchemilla mollis but how about this dainty cousin, part of the Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants exhibit. A dwarf variety, it will get to around 15cm in height.
This rather beautiful striped Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis ‘Albostriata’) was being displayed by Pershore College.
The college has long had an outdoor stand at RHS Malvern but this year was in the Floral Marquee for the first time. It had a display that celebrated its 70 years of horticultural education and showed some of the changes over that time. There were also some rather good plants for sale.
Also new to the Floral Marquee and to RHS Shows was Dan’s Plants from Cumbria. His colourful display of cottage garden flowers won silver gilt, an impressive achievement for an RHS debut and from someone who has been growing plants commercially only since 2017.
His stand showed some good plant combinations such as this geum and euphorbia. It was good to see a young member of the horticultural trade at the show.
Also making their show debut were Lancashire’s Leafy Lytham with seasonal annuals and mixed perennials.
They certainly added a blast of colour to the Floral Marquee.
This year’s RHS Master Grower was Malvern favourite Hare Spring Cottage Plants, who have National Collections of camassia, sidalcea and uvularia.
While the camassia were the stars of the display (see feature image at the top of this post), it was a masterclass not only in how to grow them but how to use them effectively in mixed planting. Quite simply beautiful.
I came home with hundreds of photos, lots of ideas and, naturally, plants. Next week, I do it all again at RHS Chelsea.
Enjoyed this? You can read about more of my show visits here.
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