Chelsea Flower Show 2023: 8 Ideas to Steal From This Year’s Gardens
Gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show can often feel rarified and unrelatable.
Photographs by Clare Coulson unless otherwise noted.
But recently the show’s organizer, the Royal Horticultural Society, has made strides to make this global showcase appeal to a far broader audience with smaller space gardens, balcony and container gardens, as well as plant-focused designs that are shown in the floral pavilion.
A Smokey Palette
A consistent palette tends to dominate the Chelsea Flower Show, with key plants popping up time and again.
But some of the most interesting spaces bucked that trend by opting for more nuanced and unusual palettes, most notably in Sarah Price’s barnstorming garden inspired by the exquisite colors of Cedric Morris’s paintings.
Dramatic Punctuation Points
There were so many fabulous succulents on Sarah Price’s Nurture Landscapes Garden—planted into gravel and in pots and handmade containers—but perhaps the most dazzling were the deep mahogany Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’ that are surely going to cause a run on these dazzling, other-worldly plants.
A Rusty Pergola
There were many ideas to steal on James Smith’s sociable London Square Community Garden, from a reading nook complete with library to a bespoke terrazzo table with a chess board designed into the table.
A Luxe Bird Feeder
Even in a show garden, visiting wildlife adds an entirely different dimension to a space, animating it, bringing life and movement.
We’d rather trees were living, but inevitably some fail or fall.
Leveraging Logs
Chunks of wood appeared in gardens large and small, providing a sculptural focal point in Jihae Hwang’s beautiful garden (pictured) inspired by Jiri mountain in South Korea, and in the Saatchi Gallery garden by the British artist Catriona Robertson, where logs were placed in amongst the planting, adding definition.
Repurposed Concrete
Designers are making great strides to eradicate concrete from their schemes but on brownfield sites or existing landscape it’s an ever-present material.
Jonathan Davies and Steve Williams of Wild City Studio paved their Balance Garden for the Centre for Mental Health with huge hulks of salvaged concrete which were laid to allow wildflowers to fill in the cracks.
Beautiful Edibles
Photograph by Oliver Dixon.
Edible forests have been blending edible crops with ornamental effects and now that boundary blurring is coming into gardens, too, mixing in beautiful, edible fruits and vegetables in borders.