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The one certainty at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is an endless stream of covetable plants and clever ideas—this year there’s heaps of innovation as designers lead the way in rethinking materials, construction and how to create resilient, future-proof gardens. Here are a few of the ideas we took note of at the 2024 show.
Photography by Clare Coulson, except where noted.
Deconstruct your planters.
Above: Chelsea first-timer Giulio Giorgi’s inventive design—offset with beautiful silvery resilient planting—won the inaugural RHS Environmental Innovation Award. He used 3D-printed terracotta bricks to build curvaceous planters that were inspired by keyhole gardens. The pieces are simply stacked together and held in place with poles—no concrete or power tools necessary—and can be easily rebuilt when he moves it to its eventual home. Photograph by Gary Morrisroe.
Just add water.
Above: Designer Tom Bannister illustrates how much impact you can achieve in a tiny space with his Ecotherapy container garden, a sensuous and immersive space with a hanging green wall providing the backdrop to a rill and a sequence of pools crafted from hyper-tufa containers. A small bench provides a place to sit and take in the soothing scene, surrounded by lush planting with ferns, hostas, tiarella and rodgersia.
Focus on foliage first.
Above: There’s always one garden that’s almost impossible to walk away from, and Tom Stuart-Smith’s transporting design for the National Garden Scheme certainly ticks that box. A stone trough, a cleft oak building, chairs that aged in his own Hertfordshire garden for years—these elements all add to the soothing aesthetic, but it’s the nearly entirely green and white planting that immediately lowers the heart rate. Exquisite azaleas, seas of foxgloves are played off against the most beautiful foliage from Aralia cordata, Farfugium japonicum, Maianthemum and the delicate woodlander Saruma henryi—all of which are a potent reminder to focus on foliage first when planning planting schemes. (See The Maestro’s Return: Tom Stuart-Smith at the Chelsea Flower Show.)
Patchwork your paving.
Above: The spirit of Sarah Price’s trail-blazing garden from last year’s Chelsea looms large at this year’s show from plant choices (fragrant Elaeagnus, beautiful pines, painterly iris) to the focus on handcrafted details, but it’s her patchwork paving, in which irregular paved paths sit alongside deconstructed gravels, that popped up time and again. Here in Ann-Marie Powell’s Octavia Hill garden, it provides the perfect foil to an intensely colorful planting, rich with foxgloves, irises, verbascums, geums and swathes of poppies.
