NOTES on. design // Chelsea Flower Show

Didn't make it to Chelsea this year? Here's a roundup of one of some of the most thought-provoking designs with a focus on Sarah Price's breathtaking tribute to Cedric Morris' garden at Benson End.

The stand out gardens of Chelsea 2023 put their faith in show over tell to deliver powerful messages about wellbeing, sustainability, connection, equality, and the resilience of nature. The most arresting of all stood out despite the crowds, with a particularly memorable tribute to the ‘ghost of Cedric Morris’ – the remnants of the artist’s garden Benson End (a new art meets garden acquisition by the Garden Museum) – by Sarah Price.

I was excited to visit Chelsea Flower Show this year as so many of the ideas behind gardens big and small resonated with my own connections with nature. Being the avid researcher that I am, it’s sometimes hard to leave the backstory behind and rely on my senses or intuition as the key tools for what I’m seeing here and now.

Visiting with a friend on a non-press day, the greatest need this year to have a relaxing and inspiring day out, it was actually weirdly refreshing to be part of the crowds – to peer over the heads of a five-people-deep moat of plant lovers, as the real Chelsea Flower Show experience actually transpires, and just see what I could see.

Being small has its disadvantages in these circumstances although I will admit to using a relatively diminutive frame to sneak my way through the gaps and allow others to take pity on said height issues and usher me through the front. Once there, you get about 5 minutes max to take in the view before it’s just rude to linger. In the age of digital this actually means 5 minutes of taking pictures. In my case this means trying to fade all the other visitors out of the background by using the portrait lens (a handy tip for bringing the focus to the front), and then quickly switching to normal lens for zoomed in details of understory planting, stand out flowers, or tree bark.

By the time I visited this year’s show I’d probably read and seen enough about it to write a book. Still it wasn’t always apparent, at first crowded-out glance, which garden was which, the map being a bit tricky to navigate due to the numbers of the main show gardens being within the show guide rather than on the key, and the signs hidden by swathes of horticulturally-inspired Sunday best. Thankfully the wonderful ambassadors on each stand were there to hand out leaflets about each garden, each amply furnished with the reasons for its creations and a much-coveted planting list. I put myself fully in charge of collecting leaflets and depositing them into our respective tote bags; Lou kept us going with food and drink breaks including a welcome, if extortionately priced, Pimm’s at 11.45am.

Somehow, we managed to spend 6 hours zigzagging around the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea (home to the scarlet-uniformed, British Army veteran Chelsea Pensioners), taking in the show gardens in a most haphazard manner but eventually covering them all. First up and without a doubt the most memorable was The Nurture Landscapes Garden designed by Sarah Price, inspired by Benton End, the former home of renowned artist Sir Cedric Morris. Did it make a difference that I knew about Morris’ specially bred Benton Irises – many dug up and scattered near and far when he died, his beloved garden left to grow wild? Or that I was aware that the hard landscaping is indicative of the original house? Or that I spent all week peering avidly at Local Works Studio’s processes behind keeping the carbon footprint of the garden as low as possible by using local and waste materials and relying on traditional craft techniques – bricks made using old pots from the Crocus nursery (all plants in the garden sourced and grown by the Surrey-based nursery, and the concept sponsored by their landscape maintenance division, Nurture Group’s), rope constructed from hop bines, walls made of straw bales?

With my journalistic hat on, such narratives always make things more interesting – I love a deep dive – but this garden doesn’t need a voice other than its own design and planting to make it sing. It is the epitome of show rather than tell (it is a ‘show’ garden after all, and this is a flower ‘show’), every feature appealing to the senses, to our inner nature. The naturally pigmented salmon pink, terracotta, and lemoncurd shades of the lime-rendered wall are distinctly Mediterranean-esque, and perhaps fit more neatly with our memories of recent summer heatwaves, baked clay earth and parched vegetation. (I also once built a lime-straw-manure wall as part of a French Permaculture initiative and so I also had a personal flashback to the sanctuary provided by such as hands-in-mud affair).

The saplings and open planting also fitting with the uncertainty of the seasons – will it grow, will it bloom, is summer even here? The irises stepping into the shoes of the tulip for we will have a flower of the year, whether we want one or not, and this is surely it: peach, purple, and sherbet Iris ‘Benton Olive’ and coffee and orange Iris ‘Benton Susan’ nodding heads with the similarly tinted, drooping bells of Allium siculum. On the wall, a delicately climbing Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ provides a painterly focal shift in pure crimson; among the earthy cast bricks, the twinkly grass-flowers of Melica altissima, silvery star-balls of Allium ‘Silver Spring’, and low scatterings of Mexican daisy (Erigeron karvinskianus) and Californian poppy (Eschscholzia californica) that I now know to be the lilac-touched ‘Lavender Lady’ and bleached buttercup tones of 'Ivory Castle' respectively – a designer’s palette at work.

And then let us discuss aeoniums – Aeonium ‘Zwartkopf’ to be precise but who cares for a name when a plant is this indisputably handsome. I recognise it from travels in hotter climes, usually one specimen pot placed outside a door or in a porch. Here the aeoniums are planted directly into the earth, the glossy blue-black, deep-red centred succulent rosettes creating arresting contrast and dynamism within what could so easily become, in less artful hands and eyes, a froth of pastels. For added drama there is one of my favourite herbs, Angelica archangelica, thrusting – for that is the only way to describe what this plant does – up into the sky with its hollow red stem (the offshoots of which old-fashioned green candy is made), bulbous bud and umbelliferous flowerhead, hundreds of precious seeds to each.

I could spend all day writing about this garden, its power to invoke the descriptive but there are other gardens of note to add. The Choose Love Garden designed by Jane Porter with its similarly baked palette, inspired by refugee migration routes across Europe and desire lines, paths created where no formal routes exist. The Zen Garden by Kazuyuki Ishihara inspired by the traditional satoyama landscapes found in the foothills of Japan, delivering the most tactile balls of moss, just-seeded acer trees in contrast with soft-needled pines, and at the bouldered spring watercress and more irises.

Grow to Know’s Green Gap Garden, Chelsea’s smallest ever by grassroots non-profit GROW TO know born out of the Grenfell disaster, here to highlight the dearth of green spaces available to disadvantaged households in one of the UK’s wealthiest and most unequal boroughs. The School Food Matter’s Garden designed by Harry Holding absolutely packed with a wilding of annual and perennial herbs, bolting vegetables, edible flowers, and pollinator-friendly specimens: fennel, alliums, California poppies, asparagus, beetroot, thyme, salvia, and oak leafed lettuce (our school garden is part funded by School Food Matters so was particularly interested in this).

The demolition, rubble, boarded up bird boxes, and broken paths of Cleve West’s The Centrepoint Garden, an uprooted silver birch reflecting the displacement of the homeless but also new beginnings in Celtic mythology. The obvious sanctuary created within Darren Hawkes Listening Garden for the Samaritans, a bronze statue of a listening figure in a quiet corner waiting to hear the thoughts of those that pass through – because you can tell a garden your secrets and it will listen too. The multiple vistas, softly layered woodland planting, temple sanctuary and reflective water feature of Chris Beardshaw’s A Life Worth Living Garden for blood cancer charity Myeloma UK. The gorgeous mix of containerised flowers within Pollyanna Wilkinson’s tribute to Women in Horticulture, those who so often sow the seeds but go overlooked.

The bees and dragonflies that naturally found their way to Tom Massey’s The Royal Entomological Society Garden thanks to a rich mix of pollen- and nectar-rich perennials and shrubs found on brownfield sites. The deep sensual planting, shade, and wide pathways in Harris Bugg’s Horatio’s Garden for those suffering from spinal injuries, which made me cry as I thought of my just passed niece Lily who spent many days of treatment for leukaemia in the similarly planted Royal Marsden, a place for her to have contact with loved ones who were not allowed inside during the pandemic. And a final cloud of white pom-pom guelder rose at the far end of the RBC Brewin Dolphin Garden by Paul Hervey-Brookes designed to express ideas about longevity, biodiversity, and habitat for the future, which indeed this wildlife-friendly, generationally loved plant does in bucket loads.

All powerful stuff, whether you’ve read the brochure or not, because plants speak to hearts and well designed gardens or green spaces, imitating nature and all its rhythms and nuances – or just left to their own devices – and aligned with the kind of recycled or repurposed materials we all should be using now, do it best. It was busy but my sense was that everyone, in their slow perambulation around the grounds, from pavilion to containers, balcony gardens, to nursery displays, was thinking the same.