Pictured: Stunning Chelsea Flower Show centrepieces battling for gardening’s most coveted title
23 May 2022, 13:49 | Updated: 23 May 2022, 13:55
The Chelsea Flower Show has returned to its traditional May slot with gardens focusing on wildlife, wellbeing and floral displays to mark the Platinum Jubilee. .
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The Chelsea Flower Show has returned to its traditional May slot with gardens focusing on wildlife, wellbeing and floral displays to mark the Platinum Jubilee.
Celebrities and members of the royal family were today getting a first look at the Royal Horticultural Society's showpiece event on Monday, before it opens to members of the public as the centrepieces battle for gardening’s most coveted title.
Among the show gardens is a recreation of a beaver wetland, complete with a beaver lodge, dam, streams and natural wildflower planting.
The show also features gardens by Meta on plants and fungi in woodland ecosystems, a Notting Hill-set exhibit that features a deforested mangrove sculpture highlighting global deforestation and racial injustice and an ice block highlighting global warming.
A floral display with the profile of the Queen in Platinum Jubilee purple marks her 70-year reign.
It is covered on both sides with an assortment of native British-grown tree branches with connecting inner shelves arranged with 70 terracotta pots planted with lily of the valley, one of the monarch's favourite plants.
Another installation aims to transport visitors to one of the Queen's favourite places, with a canopy of flowers including fresh delphiniums, emulating the colours and planting of the Scottish landscape near the royal family's Balmoral Castle estate in Aberdeenshire.
The Chelsea Flower Show is back in its May slot for the first time since 2019, after being cancelled in 2020 and moved to September for 2021 due to the pandemic.
The Boodles Travel Garden: This sanctuary garden harnesses the positive power of nature to nurture and heal while embracing themes from the 1962 travels of Anthony Wainwright, grandfather of the current chairman of Boodles.
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The Morris & Co. Garden: The garden re-imagines two of Morris’s iconic patterns. Morris’s first pattern Trellis inspires the garden layout and pathways, while his Willow Boughs pattern is reflected in the design of the pavilion and water channels.
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The Place2Be Securing Tomorrow Garden: Designed by Jamie Butterworth on his first Chelsea Flower Show, this garden is intended to promote the importance of children’s mental health, and offer a safe space where children can take time and talk.
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Alder Hey Urban Foraging Station Garden: A landscape that weaves together young and old, green and urban, play and learning, and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with its community. It aims to inspire children to lead active, healthy lives.
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St Mungo’s Putting Down Roots Garden: An urban pocket park embodies the ethos of St Mungo’s which helps people recovering from homelessness to gain confidence and grow their skills, and to rebuild their lives through gardening.
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The Perennial ‘With Love’ Garden: This garden is rooted in designer Richard Miers’ and charity Perennial’s belief that gardens are a gift of love, giving pleasure to those who create and nurture them as much as to those who visit and enjoy them.
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A floral display with the profile of the Queen in Platinum Jubilee purple marks her 70-year reign. It is covered on both sides with an assortment of native British-grown tree branches with connecting inner shelves arranged with 70 terracotta pots.
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The Mind Garden: A floral display intended to encourage people to connect with each other for our mental health. The garden is designed to be a place for people to connect, be themselves and open up.
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The RAF Benevolent Fund Garden: A statue of a young World War 2 pilot watches over the leafy display erected in the ground of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, in Chelsea.
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The Hands Off Mangrove by Grow2Know Garden: Set in Notting Hill, with a deforested mangrove sculpture at the centre acting as a stark reminder of the impacts we are having on our planet’s most important ecosystems.
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The Stitchers Garden: This garden celebrates Fine Cell Work, a charity teaching prisoners needlework, a skill that nurtures their self-worth and encourages them to lead independent lives.
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The Swiss Sanctuary Garden: Inspired by and echoing travels to Switzerland, this garden is conceived as an imaginary personal sanctuary filled with the unique flora that typifies different areas of the country.
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The Garden Sanctuary by Hamptons Garden: This garden creates a space for garden living. A garden takes us out of our homes, lets us decompress, play and reconnect.
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The Out of the Shadows Garden: This garden, inspired by recent dark times, has been designed to evoke the feeling of a contemporary spa garden, utilising hardy tropical planting to create a private, calm and relaxing space.
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The Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association (SSAFA) Garden: The garden offers a quiet, secluded area within a larger garden, providing a place for calm for those at Norton House, where families of military personnel receiving treatment can stay.
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Rewilding Britain Landscape Garden: The garden shows a rewilding landscape in the UK after the reintroduction of a native, keystone species – the beaver. Their dams create nature-rich wetlands that support many other species.
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Meta Garden: Growing the Future: Designed to emphasise the inseparable connection between plants and fungi within woodland ecosystems, this garden is inspired by the complex mycelium networks that connect and support woodland life.
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Medite Smartply Building the Future Garden: This atmospheric edge-of-forest garden has a feature building at its heart constructed using sustainable and innovative wood-based panel products to illustrate the future of sustainable landscapes.
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The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) Garden Garden: This garden is a celebration of the history and modernity of this multi- faceted charity, which has been saving lives at sea for almost 200 years, marrying design from foundation to today.
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The Brewin Dolphin Garden: Imagined as the metamorphosis of a former 1900s’ industrial site, the garden has been designed to illustrate how brownfield land can be rehabilitated using existing and repurposed materials to create a new landscape.
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The Jay Day Garden: This garden is a reimagined urban jay habitat to encourage visitors to consider integrating live plants into their bird- feeding regime and focusing the resources they provide on non-typical feeder species.
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The Cirrus Garden: This garden combines the spectacle of a show garden with a real-life sustainable garden focused on increasing the biodiversity within urban areas and providing a tranquil setting for mental health.
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Mandala Meditation and Mindfulness Garden: This garden was inspired by conditions imposed by the pandemic. It offers a safe haven to spend time sitting and meditating, listening to the tranquil water, bees humming and birds singing.
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The Wild Kitchen Garden: This brings wild edible plants and trees into a small urban setting at the Royal Chelsea Flower Show which is set to open to the public on Tuesday.
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