8 Ideas to Steal from the Gardens at Chelsea Flower Show 2023
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Gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show can often feel rarified and unrelatable. But recently the show’s organizer, the Royal Horticultural Society, has made strides to make this global showcase appeal to a far broader audience with smaller space gardens, balcony and container gardens, as well as plant-focused designs that are shown in the floral pavilion. There are plenty of ideas to steal from the main show gardens, too, with endless beguiling planting combinations, clever ideas, and bubbling-up trends that will no doubt segue from garden show innovation to our backyard gardens. Here are a few of our favorite ideas from this year’s Chelsea.
Photographs by Clare Coulson unless otherwise noted.
A Smokey Palette
Above: A consistent palette tends to dominate the Chelsea Flower Show, with key plants popping up time and again. But some of the most interesting spaces bucked that trend by opting for more nuanced and unusual palettes, most notably in Sarah Price’s barnstorming garden inspired by the exquisite colors of Cedric Morris’s paintings. And in Jane Porter’s Choose Love Garden (pictured)—a community garden that will be relocated to Good Food Matters in South London—more delicious hues reigned with dusty apricot verbascums center stage amongst deep burgundy Atriplex hortensis, fennel, irises, orange geums and Salvia lavandulifolia, and thyme.
Dramatic Punctuation Points
Above: There were so many fabulous succulents on Sarah Price’s Nurture Landscapes Garden—planted into gravel and in pots and handmade containers—but perhaps the most dazzling were the deep mahogany Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’ that are surely going to cause a run on these dazzling, other-worldly plants.
A Rusty Pergola
Above: There were many ideas to steal on James Smith’s sociable London Square Community Garden, from a reading nook complete with library to a bespoke terrazzo table with a chess board designed into the table. The garden also offered up a clever way to create a garden structure in a cost effective way by using Surrey Ironcraft to construct a pergola using fine steel rods.
A Luxe Bird Feeder
Above: Even in a show garden, visiting wildlife adds an entirely different dimension to a space, animating it, bringing life and movement. In Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg’s garden for the charity Horatio’s the designers went one step further in the quest for the perfect bird table by commissioning Weber Industries, who constructed the beautiful sequoia-shingled garden building, to make a matching wooden table, adding a sculptural note at the heart of the garden.
