David Domoney

Category: Appearances

David Domoney is a Television Presenter and Chartered Horticulturalist who presents on several ITV programmes and also speaks at public events.

  • The 10 top garden trends from RHS Chelsea Flower Show

    The 10 top garden trends from RHS Chelsea Flower Show

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    Chelsea is a great place to see what’s going on in the garden design world. It’s full of the best of the industry doing incredible work, and there’s always loads of great ideas you can take home to your own garden.

    I’ve picked the top ten trends from the show this year – click on the images to enlarge them!

    Purple

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    Irises

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    M&G garden

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    Usually there’s one overriding colour, and this year it was purple. One of the main trends was purple lillies around the water features, which cropped up in loads of show gardens!

    Purple flowers were also used to great effect with green foliage. It works with rich, dark shades and lighter yellow-greens. In the Help for Heroes garden, white flowers contrasted with the purple, and deeper reds and pinks added more colour.

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    Repeat plants

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    Help for Heroes garden
    Help for Heroes garden

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    Woodland

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    Ferns

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    Woodland path

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    There were plenty of great woodland-style gardens at the show this year. Trees bring height and shade, so this trend uses a lot of shade-loving foliage. Ferns are the easiest way to get a forest look, but you can go the whole hog like Hillier by edging borders with hosta-covered logs. I also liked the traditional woodland path – complete with leaves!

    For colour, traditional white flowers always work, but reds and pinks were also used to give a richer feel. Try this pink pleione with lily of the valley. Make sure plants have interesting foliage too.

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    Pleione

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    Try reds and pinks with rich foliage

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    Meadow

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    Silene dioica

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    Irises
    Irises

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    Planting wild meadow flowers is very much in fashion at the moment, and they featured heavily at Chelsea. I loved the delicate pink flowers of this silene dioica. The grasses gave the flower beds a wilder feel, and I liked the delicate irises cleverly planted among them.

    To stop this looking scruffy, try repeating plants. This basically means putting the same plant in different places in the bed. And why not mark the centenary of the First World War with these great ladybird poppies?

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    Meadow grasses
    Meadow grasses

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    Ladybird poppies
    Ladybird poppies

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    Round water features

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    Tree water feature
    Tree water feature

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    Black metal
    Black metal

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    I couldn’t believe how many of the water features were in circles! I love the tree waterfall – it has a really calm, trickling sound. This black metal pool also contrasted nicely with the natural stones and planting in the garden.

    For something more modern, try a sleek silver water feature with underwater lighting set in sharp paving. Or my favourite, which was the round pond in the No Man’s Land garden, surrounded by green vegetation. People often leave pond planting quite sparse, but this is so lush!

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    Contemporary fountain
    Contemporary fountain

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    No Man's Land garden RHS Chelsea
    No Man’s Land

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    Spy-through circles

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    Rough stone
    Rough stone

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    Smooth stone
    Smooth stone

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    I spotted these everywhere. They make great features in small gardens, despite their size. You can use them to break up the view, making the garden appear bigger because you can’t see everything in one go. Plus it creates a little window, like you’re looking into a secret garden.

    You can try traditional stone or contemporary metal, and they give great shadows when the sun shines through the hole!

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    Metal
    Metal

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    Shadows
    Shadows

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    Coastal

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    Alan Titchmarsh garden
    Alan Titchmarsh garden

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    Saxifrage
    Saxifrage

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    The ‘From the moors to the sea’ garden by Alan Titchmarsh and Kate Gould set the coastal tone this year. There was a wide range of tough seaside plants at the show, from saxifrage to succulents.

    It’s also a great idea to add to the mood with coastal knick-knacks like boats, life belts, driftwood and fishing cages.

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    Knick-knacks
    Knick-knacks

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    Succulents
    Succulents

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    Orange

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    Meadow flowers
    Meadow flowers

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    Guem
    Geum

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    Another popular colour was orange, especially for meadow flowers. I loved this on the Perennial GRBS stand mixed in with purple blooms (three trends in one!). Geum is a great tall flower for wild planting.

    It was good to see lots of harmonious planting with reds and yellows – it’s an easy way to make such a vibrant colour feel like part of the garden. And check out these lovely rhododendrons!

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    Reds and yellows
    Reds and yellows

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    Rhododendrons
    Rhododendrons

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    Why not check out my favourite plants from the show?

    Cubes and rectangles

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    Help for Heroes
    Help for Heroes

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    Ornamental
    Ornamental

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    This is a simple way to give structure to casual planting – there were loads of squares, rectangles and blocks built into garden beds. My favourite was the lovely Help for Heroes garden, with sharp grey stones and neatly clipped box. Elsewhere, wooden blocks doubled up as ornament stands!

    The concrete blocks and squares also gave the Mind’s Eye garden a contemporary feel and helped make the water feature blend in with the design. The geometric walls and mirrors at the back made it feel like a modern art gallery garden!

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    Box
    Box

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    Mind's Eye garden
    Mind’s Eye garden

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    White and green

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    Cornus alternifolia
    Cornus alternifolia

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    This is a classic garden colour combination, and was used to great effect this year. There is a risk of looking boring if you only use two colours, so the trick is to plant a wide range of shapes, heights and textures. My favourite look was the Hillier garden, where abstract zinc structures made the classic colour scheme feel modern.

    The cornus alternifolia is a great shrub for both colours – it has marbled leaves and delicate white blossom. The white lavender also works well alongside soft, silver foliage, and white foxgloves are a key plant for height and flowers.

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    White lavender
    White lavender

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    Foxgloves
    Foxgloves and foliage

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    Read about the best weird and wonderful plants at Chelsea.

    Modern metal

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    Pyramid
    Pyramid

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    African
    African

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    Metal has been a feature in gardens for years, but now it has gone modern! The pyramid water feature is both contemporary and ancient-looking at the same time, like the mock African statues. For something more understated, try an abstract sculpture among the trees and paint your fence grey!

    The most eye-catching piece was the water feature in the Stoke City Council garden. It looked like the water was gushing out of one half and into the other, though in fact it was running over Perspex. The modern metal contrasted with the rich pinks and reds in the flower beds.

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    Contemporary
    Contemporary

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    Stoke City Council garden
    Stoke City Council garden

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    Find out the best black plants seen at Chelsea this year!

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  • My top 12 weird and wonderful plants from the Chelsea Flower Show

    My top 12 weird and wonderful plants from the Chelsea Flower Show

    As you probably know, I love wacky plants. I’ve already talked about my favourite plants from Chelsea, and the best black plants, but I’m always on the lookout for unusual and quirky plants. It’s great to try something a bit different, and I had to show you these beauties!

    Sarracenia purpurea

    Sarracenia-purpurea-pitchers

    This is a fantastic meat-eating plant that digests the insects that fall into its little pitchers on the ground. It also has weird-looking flower heads!

    Sarracenia-purpurea

    Trollius Dancing Flame

    trollius-dancing-flame

    I love this plant. It looks like it has flickering orange flames coming out of the flower head! Its textured green foliage means it would look great in a bright garden border.

    Fork-leaved sundew

    fork-leaved-sundew

    This is a great carnivorous plant that is native to Australia. Its name comes from its leaves, which are divided in two like a fork in the road.

    Meconopsis Lingholm

    himalayan-blue-poppy

    Also known as the Himalayan Blue Poppy. Its colour is such an unnatural shade for a flower, and it would make a great addition to a cottage garden or summer flower bed.

    Aechmea

    aechmea

    How snazzy is this? Its name comes from the Greek for spear, ‘aichme’, and it makes a fantastic houseplant.

    Iris Gingerbread Man

    iris-gingerbreadman

    Irises come in a huge range of colours, but I’ve never seen this one before! It’s a pale gingery-brown and lilac, which gives it a really odd look.

    Zingiber Spectabile

    zingiber

    This is an incredible species of true ginger, often known as the beehive ginger because of its hive-like shape.

    Cypripedium

    cyprepedium

    Often called a slipper orchid, cypripedium means ‘Shoe of Venus’ in Greek. There were some exceptional varieties, but I liked this mottled pink one best.

    Allium Sativum Ophioscorodon

    serpent-garlic

    It’s actually a variety of garlic, known as serpent garlic. This plant has amazing stems that twist around and point all over the place! It’s actually about 40cm tall.

    Leucospermum Cordifolium

    Leucospermum-cordifolium

    This is a great flowering shrub with fantastic flowers. This one in particular has bold orange petals – it would stand out in any garden!

    Lagorus Ovatus ‘Bunny tails’

    bunny-tails

    It’s one of those plants that makes you just want to reach out and touch it. Grasses are so underrated – they give your garden great texture.

    Scadoxus Multiflorus

    David Domoney scadoxus

    This incredibly flower also wins the title of ‘My favourite plant from Chelsea 2014’ – the next best thing to a gold medal! It’s just such a bold flower. I’m already planning to plant some in my garden!

  • Seven things you wouldn’t expect to see at the Chelsea Flower Show

    Seven things you wouldn’t expect to see at the Chelsea Flower Show

    Trees. Flowers. Gardens. You know what to expect from Chelsea. But if you look closely, you’ll see there’s more to the show than first meets the eye. Here are my favourites.

    Gorillas

    gorilla-1

    Hardly a staple of British gardening. I saw a huge gorilla statue covered in delicate pink rosebuds lying on a piano, with another just behind it made of black mussel shells.

    gorilla-2

    Dinosaur

    dinosaur

    In a similar vein, check out this six foot dinosaur! Those are some pretty sharp shell teeth!

    Garden robot

    robot

    You can’t tell from the picture, but this robot’s arms move up and down, and its eyes flash. It’s great fun – I think every garden should get one.

    Dogs on leads

    dogs

    Stone dogs are a regular sight on garden gates, but I like the twist on these – metal leads. Surely a guard dog on a leash is much less threatening than one that’s free to chase you!

    Bull beer holder

    cow

    A brightly coloured metal bull statue is already an odd thing to see at Chelsea. But one filled with beer is really different. And also a great idea.

    Ceiling plants

    ceiling-flowers

    We’re used to seeing plants on walls, floors, stands and even people at Chelsea. But this year we had plants hanging from the rafters too! There was a lovely Hippeastrum ceiling inside the marquee, and a display of bulbs suspended on string.

    bulb-ceiling

    Orange shoes

    shoes

    Perhaps the most unexpected thing was this pair of orange and silver loafers, spotted on the feet of a very dapper gentleman. Because it’s not just about the gardens, you know!