Plant recommendations from David Domoney. David is a Chartered Horticulturalist with over 40 years of experience growing and caring for plants. David has also worked on UK national television for over 2 decades. As a garden designer, David has won over 30 RHS medals for his garden designs at leading UK gardening shows and events.
Despite its name, The Chelsea Flower Show is about more than just flowers – it’s about foliage. It’s the unsung hero of garden design and people often overlook its importance in flower beds. But it plays an important role as the backdrop for the flowers and adds structure and texture.
Here are my favourite plants for foliage from the show.
Lagorus Ovatus Bunny tails
This is one of those plants that you have in the garden just to touch. Plant it in your flower beds and let the tips move about in the wind.
Heuchera
This is the standard low-growing plant for foliage, and it’s such a good choice. It comes in a range of colours, but I spotted this nice purple shade – it’s the top colour trend this year!
Pine trees
All gardens should have trees, but if yours is small, try a dwarf tree like this. Evergreen is best for foliage, and gives structure in winter when all the flowering plants are dormant. And the texture works well with more delicate flowers.
Vriesea Hieroglyphica
This is a great plant for tropical foliage – its markings almost remind me of zebra stripes.
Heucherella Sweet Tea
For a bit of Autumnal colour in summer, try heucherella. Its foliage looks like autumn tree leaves littering the floor, and its tiny white blooms add an elegant touch.
Hosta
Hostas are great plants for shade – spots under trees or beds behind fences and walls. But they also look great in mixed flower borders.
Poinsettia
This is the archetypal bright foliage, traditionally a Christmas plant. But it looks good outside too.
Molinia Caerula
This is a fantastic grass for planting among bed and borders to break up the flowers. It also looks great in containers for a modern effect.
Bromeliaceae Neoregilia
Tropical plants are always in fashion, and this one has the added bonus of red foliage. It makes great groundcover too.
Millium effusum
It looks like a thick-bladed grass, and it’s great for underplanting – this means planting around the base of taller plants. And it’s a lovely yellowy-green colour.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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
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
How snazzy is this? Its name comes from the Greek for spear, ‘aichme’, and it makes a fantastic houseplant.
Iris Gingerbread Man
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
This is an incredible species of true ginger, often known as the beehive ginger because of its hive-like shape.
Cypripedium
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
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
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’
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
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!
