‘23

By: Christine Stevens

This year the most famous flower show in the world had a very different feel to it. For the last few years, the show has floundered and lost some of its popularity. This year it came back with a bang.

The themes for the show gardens were very much based around sustainability and pollinators. The catchphrase was “Edimentals”- blending edibles in with ornamental plants, which is something I think home gardeners have, on the whole, being doing for many years, but now has a name and professional gardeners showed how beautifully this can be done. Many of the gardens had health and wellbeing as their inspiration. Gone are the formal gardens, there was not a single patch of lawn in sight.

This new loose feel featured garden had flowers such as foxgloves, a huge amount of beautiful iris, tall prairie grasses and beautiful climbing roses. The planting overall was very naturalistic. The wildflowers looked lovely, and many stands featured the importance of weeds as pollinators. A controversial subject, but as so many weeds are edible, I for one am firmly on their side as long as they do not take over.

Every year a flower of the year is announced, and this year that flower was Agapanthus Black Jack - a cross between two South African varieties creating a dark flower with many beautiful flower heads. Agapanthus are becoming increasingly popular worldwide.

My personal favourite garden that kept drawing me back again and again was “The Nurture Landscapes Garden” by Sarah Price. The garden featured a beautiful mix of irises, tulips, tulbaghia and poppies, all in soft colours planted in a natural space surrounded by straw bale walls, rendered in lime mortar. Some of the plants were in huge, handmade, earth-coloured pots and the overall effect was that of an impressionist painting.

Another very beautiful garden was Mark Gregory’s the Savills Garden. Mark has won over a dozen gold medals at previous shows. This garden featured a magnificent working outdoor kitchen area where chefs prepared lunch daily from plants grown in the garden, which, needless to say, were replaced each night so that the garden always looked per- fect. The flowers had a pastel palate of whites, pinks and blues which worked beautifully between the rows of green vegetables. A small stream flowed through the garden with water captured from the roof of the kitchen area to feature sustainable irrigation methods, and a huge urn filled with water and cut flowers for the birds and insects to make use of.

The Balance Garden featured a mushroom growing area inside a re-purposed shipping container that was completely transformed to create the smartest mushroom shed anyone has ever seen. This was surrounded by a glade of wildflowers and pollinators featuring the importance of natural landscape pollinators. This was the first year that Mushrooms have made an appearance at the show, and judging by this garden’s popularity, it won’t be the last.

Alongside the large show gardens were smaller sanctuary gardens and balcony gardens which featured ideas and plants suited to the urban environment. Overall, there were so many beautiful ideas that reached a much broader appeal, so it was very easy to leave the show with loads of ideas and information to include in your own garden.