All week, we’re resurfacing the preferred posts printed on Gardenista this 12 months. If this story is new to you, take pleasure in! And when you’ve already learn this earlier than, we hope you’ll prefer it simply as a lot as the primary time round.
The one certainty on the RHS Chelsea Flower Present is an countless stream of covetable vegetation and intelligent concepts—this 12 months there’s heaps of innovation as designers prepared the ground in rethinking supplies, development and how one can create resilient, future-proof gardens. Listed here are a couple of of the concepts we took be aware of on the 2024 present.
Images by Clare Coulson, besides the place famous.
Deconstruct your planters.
Above: Chelsea first-timer Giulio Giorgi’s creative design—offset with stunning silvery resilient planting—gained the inaugural RHS Environmental Innovation Award. He used 3D-printed terracotta bricks to construct curvaceous planters that had been impressed by keyhole gardens. The items are merely stacked collectively and held in place with poles—no concrete or energy instruments vital—and may be simply rebuilt when he strikes it to its eventual dwelling. {Photograph} by Gary Morrisroe.
Simply add water.
Above: Designer Tom Bannister illustrates how a lot impression you may obtain in a tiny house along with his Ecotherapy container backyard, a sensuous and immersive house with a dangling inexperienced wall offering the backdrop to a rill and a sequence of swimming pools crafted from hyper-tufa containers. A small bench gives a spot to sit down and take within the soothing scene, surrounded by lush planting with ferns, hostas, tiarella and rodgersia.
Deal with foliage first.
Above: There’s at all times one backyard that’s virtually unimaginable to stroll away from, and Tom Stuart-Smith’s transporting design for the Nationwide Backyard Scheme definitely ticks that field. A stone trough, a cleft oak constructing, chairs that aged in his personal Hertfordshire backyard for years—these components all add to the soothing aesthetic, nevertheless it’s the practically fully inexperienced and white planting that instantly lowers the guts price. Beautiful azaleas, seas of foxgloves are performed off in opposition to probably the most stunning foliage from Aralia cordata, Farfugium japonicum, Maianthemum and the fragile woodlander Saruma henryi—all of that are a potent reminder to concentrate on foliage first when planning planting schemes. (See The Maestro’s Return: Tom Stuart-Smith on the Chelsea Flower Present.)
Patchwork your paving.
Above: The spirit of Sarah Worth’s trail-blazing backyard from final 12 months’s Chelsea looms giant at this 12 months’s present from plant selections (aromatic Elaeagnus, stunning pines, painterly iris) to the concentrate on handcrafted particulars, nevertheless it’s her patchwork paving, through which irregular paved paths sit alongside deconstructed gravels, that popped up repeatedly. Right here in Ann-Marie Powell’s Octavia Hill backyard, it gives the proper foil to an intensely colourful planting, wealthy with foxgloves, irises, verbascums, geums and swathes of poppies.
