People's choice
The results for the BBC RHS People’s Award were:
Best Show Garden – The Bupa Garden designed by Cleve West
Best Small Garden – Motor Neurone Disease, Shetland Croft House Garden designed by Sue Hayward Garden Designs
RHS Chelsea Flower Show Awards
And the winners are...
Chelsea goes green
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show has gone green. Not just in the sense of recycling and reusing, but also in planting schemes. While blue and purple flowers have dominated the Show Gardens in the past, this year the Main Avenue is awash with shades of green.
Grow your own at Chelsea
Fruit and vegetable lovers’ won’t be disappointed this year with many of the show gardens and Great Pavilion stands embracing our enthusiasm for growing our own.
Chelsea @ home
Have you ever fancied having a little piece of RHS Chelsea Flower Show at home in your garden? Well, now's your chance.
We've asked some of this year's garden designers to let us have detailed planting plans of parts of their gardens that you can recreate at home.
Sloane in Bloom
From 20-24 May, the Sloane Area* close to the showground is transforming its streets into a large-scale, floral fashion show.
Shops that are usually home to some of the most exquisite fashion collections, will for one week, house some of the most enchanting floral fashion displays, which will be judged by the RHS.
The Sloane Area is home to major international couture giants including Bulgari, Cartier, Chloe, Hermes and Louis Vuitton, while sophisticated boutiques such as Smythson and Jo Malone offer a range of gifts for the stylishly minded. However, during the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, this annual event entices even the most faithful fashionistas to view their favourite brand’s floral entry rather than its collection.
Previous entries in Sloane in Bloom have included L K Bennett’s giant shoes, Tiffany & Co’s iconic blue gift boxes and even oversized Bulgari clocks! Now in its third year, with more than 30 retailers participating, the competition is set to be fierce with retailers all vying to be awarded the prestigious Sloane in Bloom 2008 medal.
The Sloane Area offers a myriad of shops and restaurants to suit each and every taste. From quality high street brands such as Zara to chic boutiques like Chloe and Louis Vuitton, there is plenty to browse and if all the walking gets too much, take advantage of the many floral themed menus, such as Harvey Nichols’ floral afternoon tea, being served at restaurants and cafés around the area.
Sloane in Bloom, the floral fashion fair, runs annually in support of RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
* The Sloane Area includes Sloane Street, Sloane Square, Duke Of York Square, Ellis Street and Pont Street.
Gardens live on
Many of the gardens, and elements within the gardens, at the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show will carry on living after the show ends.
Setting the trends
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is more than just flowers; attracting some of the best designers from around the world, Chelsea is a showcase for the newest and most fashionable trends in garden design.
Ideal for gardeners who are a little short of space, vertical planting is going up at Chelsea. Designers are using vertical planting techniques to pack in more plants, provide a habitat for wildlife, drown out noise, or screen urban gardens from the intrusion of city life. Get ideas from the Green Living garden, The Children’s Society Garden and the Pemberton Greenish Recess Garden.
Designers are also making a splash at Chelsea, with water featuring strongly in gardens of all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s for drowning out the noise of urban living, watering plants or for attracting wildlife, designers are set to inspire visitors to make responsible water use the gardener’s choice for 2008. Visit A Cadogan Garden, The Lloyds TSB Garden, The Daily Telegraph Garden or The Bupa Garden to see how water can transform your garden.
If you want a closer look at the upcoming trends, visit the Marshalls Garden Design Forum. Talks from some of the award-winning designers at the show will provide a glimpse at the inspiration behind the gardens, and help to highlight what’s hot - and what’s not.
Shop ‘til you drop
From gloves to gazebos, and everything in between, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show features more than 250 trade stands, and many will be offering visitors the chance to buy products launched exclusively at the show.
Products to be seen for the first time include a sculpted wooden shell seat, by Architectural Heritage, the proceeds of which will go to the Strawberry Hill Trust to restore Horace Walpole’s 18th century Gothic villa. Country Greenhouses is launching a new Victorian Climbers range of greenhouses at the show, and Whichford Pottery is showing a number of decorative flower pot and sculpture designs.
With many more new product launches, and a host of gardening favourites returning to the show, all gardeners and garden lovers can find something tempting at Chelsea.
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion
With flowers blooming on the catwalks of Paris and London, some of the world’s leading fashion designers have created limited edition designs to be showcased on the catwalk of the gardening world.
World renowned shoe designer, Manolo Blahnik has created a limited edition rose print RHS Chelsea Flower Show shoe, of which only 10 pairs will be made. Susannah Hunter, who counts Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman and Helena Christensen among her fans, has created the RHS Chelsea Flower Show Bloomsbury Bag. And Liberty of London has been inspired by the show to create a scarf with a hand-painted design of a beautiful, enchanted garden.
Followers of fashion will have a chance to see these beautiful designs at the show, and to see how the designs have inspired some of the world’s leading florists. Paula Pryke, Jane Packer and Fiona Barnett have designed spectacular floristry displays inspired by the fashions of Susannah Hunter, Liberty of London and Ben de Lisi, the renowned fashion designer.
Cayman Islands at Chelsea
Threatened native orchids and other plants endemic to the Cayman Islands will be displayed at Chelsea. This is the first time they have been seen at Chelsea - and perhaps anywhere in Britain.
The Marshalls Garden Design Forum
Following on from the success of its launch last year, the Marshalls Garden Design Forum is returning to the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, to give visitors the chance to pick the brains of some of the best garden designers, florists, growers and plantsmen.
The Marshalls Garden Design Forum hosts a series of interactive talks throughout the duration of the show from some of the world’s most prominent gardening experts, and visitors will have the chance to quiz the experts with their questions.
Blue Peter gardener, Chris Collins, and Sven Wombwell, TV gardener on shows such as House Doctor and Garden Invaders, are at the show giving visitors a behind the scenes glimpse into the creation of The Marshalls Garden That Kids Really Want!
Chris says: “There is so much that goes into creating a garden at Chelsea, and it’s something that most people never get to see or learn about. The Garden Design Forum is a chance for us to reveal what it takes to put together a garden for the world’s best flower show.”
Gardening greats at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show: Arabella Lennox-Boyd
Returning for the first time since 2000, renowned garden designer and five times Chelsea Gold Medal winner, Arabella Lennox-Boyd is designing a show garden at the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
Arabella return to the show with ‘The Daily Telegraph Garden. Expect another crowd-pleaser this year from Arabella with her Japanese-inspired garden. Plants have pride of place in her garden, with hard landscaping reduced to a minimum. Look out for planting combinations of bamboo, Gunnera, irises and roses.
Small, but perfectly formed gardens
For the first time in 2008, small gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower show will be grouped together according to whether they present a modern urban retreat, or a countryside idyll.
In previous years small gardens have been described as courtyard, city, chic or roof, and have been grouped as such in the showground. The new urban gardens category brings together all small gardens that would fit into a modern, urban setting, encompassing the city, chic, front and roof gardens. The courtyard gardens provide a contrast with design ideas for a rural setting; these remain a separate category.
There will be 22 small gardens at the 2008 show, so there will be something to inspire every visitor with a small space of their own. Highlights include an urban garden designed by Kazuyuki Ishihara of AOA Corporation, who has designed a roof garden inspired by childhood games of building dens that lead to secret worlds. In contrast, Sue Hayward of Earthly Garden Designs, has designed a courtyard garden to reflect the costal existence of a Sheltland crofter.
A rising star at the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show
Not content with designing two gardens at the 2008 RHS Flower Show at Tatton Park later in the year, Gold Medal-winning designer Phillippa Probert will be making her debut at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show with a small garden called Green Living.
Phillippa has always known she wanted to be a garden designer, and straight after school, spent a year in Edinburgh learning landscape architecture, before completing a garden design course with the Welsh College of Horticulture. Two months after graduating, she built her first garden at the RHS Flower Show at Tatton Park.
Just three years after that illustrious start at Tatton, Phillippa will be creating her first small garden at Chelsea in the new urban garden category. Her design is a modern garden for a young, busy couple living in the heart of the city. It is intended to disguise a grey, city backdrop and bring a touch of nature into an urban environment.