Blog, Gardening Advice
Chelsea Flower Show 2023
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 was a week-long event that took place from May 23 to 27 at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, England. The show is the world’s largest flower show and attracts over 165,000 visitors each year.
The show featured a wide variety of gardens, including traditional English gardens, contemporary gardens, and container/balcony gardens return for another year. There were also exhibits on gardening trends, new plants, and garden design.
One of the highlights of the show was the RHS Plant of the Year competition. The winner of the competition was a new black and purple striped agapanthus that looks striking in borders and containers. We’re lucky enough to have these at Polhill for customers to buy, keep an eye on our social media for the price and availability.
CENTREPOINT GARDEN
Gold Medal Winner & Best Construction Award
Centrepoint are a charity dedicated to helping homeless young people a future. Their garden is not only inspiring but gave us a moment to reflect as well as appreciating those things we take for granted every day!
When we think of the Chelsea Flower Show, I think many of us think of manicured gardens and perfect planting – but this completely shakes it up. With mixed planting, and a part-demolished house, they have allowed nature to take over, highlighting the importance of how a garden makes a house a home.
The yew paintings amongst the garden is made up of roughly 120,000 dots – highlighting the number of homeless young people in the UK.
HORATIO’S GARDEN
Gold Medal Winner and Best Show Garden
To date ‘Horatios Gardens’ have opened six gardens in the UK, this inspiring organisation is dedicated to help support, nurture the wellbeing of people after a spinal injury. The gardens are all found in the heart of NHS Spinal Injury centres. This fully accessible garden is wheelchair friendly incorporates influences from the Sheffield region, which links directly with its final home of the Princess Royal Spinal Injuries centre in Sheffield.
The tactile stone cairns gave movement and water added a sensory experience to the garden. The garden pod at the end of the garden, offers a place of peacefulness and reflection – a perfect combination for rehabilitation.
MYELOMA UK – A LIFE WORTH LIVING GARDEN
Gold Medal Winner & People’s Choice Award
“The garden is created with the firm belief that beautiful gardens are truly transformative spaces.” Sponsored by Myeloma UK and Project Giving Back, this garden aims to help us reflect, take a moment and soak up all the goodness being amongst nature can give us. The formal border leads on to a ‘jewel garden’ giving centre stage to wonderful Spring planting.
This garden also marks a significant date for Myeloma UK, who have now been established for 25 years, caring for patients who live with an incurable, but treatable, blood cancer.
The colour purple seemed to appear almost everywhere at the show, whether it was the signage or the merchandise in the RHS shop, it was the colour of the year. However, it was the choice of plants and flowers that inspired us the most, with purple also making an appearance.
There was a cottage style of planting that ran throughout the show, even amongst the trade stands, who had beautifully decorated pots and borders to highlight their products.
What is cottage style gardening? Forget straight lines and perfectly manicured gardens, borders are made up of a beautiful mix of bulbs, perennials, flowering shrubs, and climbers.
Using tall plants such as delphiniums, foxgloves and lupins create a wonderful structure and backdrop to the smaller more delicate flowers and shrubs. Alliums were quite the star of the show, with so many being used in amongst the bedding displays. The shape and texture of this plant added contrast to the bushy and defined flowers of the foxglove and hosta leaves in some of the displays.
Sustainability and planting for a greener planet is something we have all be pushing for, but also you have probably heard through Gardeners World and advertising of products such as fertiliser and compost. So, it wasn’t a surprise to see pollinator plants and wildflowers dominating some of the displays, including scabious, foxgloves, cows parsley, poppies, roses, dahlias and many many more.
It is a lot easier to incorporate these plants within your borders than you might think, you can now purchase ‘lawn wildflower mixes’ and create your very own meadow – or grow your favourites from seed, such as cornflowers and cosmos!
One of the biggest takeaways for us is nothing has to be perfect! The depiction of The Chelsea Flower Show may be manicured gardens and perfect borders, but actually I think we are slowly coming away from that and allowing nature to take its course a little more.
