The Chelsea Flower Show is over for another year, and around this time I always look back to the great projects I’ve done there.
I created the first exhibit with living creatures during show days (not just press day) with my 2008 underwater garden. It was the first ever underwater garden at Chelsea, featuring 50 varieties of plants never before seen at the show.
The following year, I designed the Ace of Diamonds garden, full of glittering gems and genuine diamonds, worth a whopping £20m. It was the most expensive garden ever created at Chelsea, and as far as I know, the only one to come with its own security!
My wild birds garden was great fun to launch – we released 100 white doves on the garden on press day! It was the first time this had been done at Chelsea. And for my reflections garden, I added interactive paving – it changed colour when you walked on it!
I created the first royal gnomes seen at the show, and the first caricature gnomes, with my affectionate portrayal of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Gnomes are often associated with bringing good luck, I could not think of a more popular couple that the nation was wishing good luck to at the time!
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.
