8 star plants of RHS Badminton 2026

Discover plants that stood out at the brand new RHS Badminton Flower Show, designer blooms to beat the heat, and inspiring garden ideas to take home

The plants at a glance:

Silphium mohrii – shaggy rosinweed
Rosa The Lark Ascending – rose The Lark Ascending
Daucus carota – wild carrot
Lathyrus chloranthus – green sweet pea
Digitalis × valinii ‘Firecracker’ and friends – foxgloves with Canary Island heritage
Malva moschata f. alba – white musk mallow
Oryzopsis miliacea – smilo grass
Elaeagnus multiflora – cherry silverberry

1. Silphium mohrii – shaggy rosinweed

“This is an American prairie plant that has only been in cultivation for about 20 years,” says designer Tom Stuart-Smith, gesturing across a low swathe of effortless purple and blue-themed planting in the largest ever RHS show garden to a group of sunflower-like blooms nodding delicately above the rest.

“It’s Silphium mohrii. This is a bestselling plant for some of the large nurseries in the Netherlands, and very drought-tolerant, but it’s still relatively unknown in the UK.”

Providing for pollinators and later for birds, this robust and hardworking perennial gives an abundance of elegant lemon-yellow blooms from summer right through into autumn, making it a valuable plant for late summer colour.

On The Julia Rausing Garden, Tom has peppered his Silphium through a tapestry of Stipa tenuissima grasses, flowering oregano and Allium sphaerocephalon, and elsewhere, paired it with the striking grey leaves of cardoon (Cynara cardunculus).

Position: full sun or partial shade
Soil: well-drained
Flowering period: July–November
Hardiness: fully hardy

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2. Rosa The Lark Ascending

A David Austin English shrub rose released in 2012, The Lark Ascending is a name that’s cropping up more and more in conversations about resilient roses.

Melissa Mabbitt, Executive Editor of RHS The Garden magazine, has found this robust repeat-bloomer to be a winner in her own garden. “I’ve had to abandon growing roses in my very stony garden because the soil is just not deep or rich enough – all apart from the last stalwart, The Lark Ascending,” she says. “It seems to shrug off heat and drought, and still looks super healthy, despite never being fed.”

The blooms mature through luscious shades of apricot and peach, making for a stunning combination with electric blue or blue-mauve flowers, such as the Salvia ‘Blue Spire’ (formerly Perovskia) it nestles beside on The Archers 75th Anniversary Garden.

Position: full sun or partial shade
Soil: well-drained or moist but well-drained
Flowering period: June–October
Hardiness: fully hardy

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3. Daucus carota – wild carrot

If there is one plant stealing the show from The Lark Ascending on The Archers 75th Anniversary Garden, it’s the humble wild carrot. This underused British native wildflower flows effortlessly through chestnut paling fencing and froths around a rustic wooden stile, creating a breathtaking sea of airy white flowerheads that emanates a country meadow or fieldside in the height of summer.

The carrot showcases how easily a beautiful meadow effect can be created simply by adding one wildflower to an area of long grass. Try this at home and months of pollinator-friendly flowers will be followed by architectural seedheads that, in uncut areas, will persist to create interest throughout autumn and winter.

Alternatively, being perennial, low-maintenance and more drought-tolerant than other white umbels such as Ammi, wild carrot is perfect for dotting through a dry border. Best grown from seed sprinkled where you’d like the plants to appear, it’s fabulous for cut flowers too.

Position: full sun
Soil: well-drained
Flowering period: June–September
Hardiness: fully hardy

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4. Lathyrus chloranthus – green sweet pea

Rising behind the bountiful bunches of pink, purple, white and red scented blooms adorning English Sweet Peas’ stand in the Floral Marquee, one specimen at centre-back might just stop you in your tracks.

Enter Lathyrus chloranthus, a little known and even more rarely grown annual sweet pea. The perfect balance of understated yet zingy, this wild species pea is resplendent in chartreuse. If you aren’t a fan of the large, bright blooms of Spencer types, or you just want to try something a bit different, this is the sweet pea for you. Native to the Middle East and with slightly hairy leaves, this lime-green number is likely to cope better with heatand drought than traditional English Lathyrus odoratus cultivars, too.

“We treat Lathyrus chloranthus completely differently to Lathyrus odoratus varieties,” says Alison Shreeve of English Sweet Peas. “Instead of growing it as a cordon up a wigwam and removing tendrils, to encourage longer stems and bigger blooms, we simply let it scramble over a support and just pick it to prolong flowering. We’ve used hazel and birch prunings from the garden to create a dome shape for it to scramble over.

“Though it doesn’t have a scent, it’s such an unusual colour, and we’ve found it to be quite tough.”

Position: full sun
Soil: moist but well-drained
Flowering period: May–September
Hardiness: hardy annual

5. Digitalis × valinii ‘Firecracker’ and friends

If there’s one plant that appears everywhere across the showground at RHS Badminton, aside from the achillea that has long been a staple of the July RHS Shows, it is so-called ‘digiplexis’. This array of rusty, orange, apricot, terracotta and even raspberry-toned foxglove cultivars is a product of breeding from Canary Island foxgloves, which were previously called Isoplexis, but are now absorbed into the wider foxglove genus Digitalis.

Unlike the more traditional May or June-blooming biennial foxgloves, Digitalis purpurea, these perennial foxgloves not only come in an array of sizzling shades, but also form a clump that will keep churning out flower spikes all summer long if deadheaded.

“I chose Digitalis ‘Firecracker’ and the raspberry-toned ‘Falcon Fire’ over Digitalis purpurea because they flower later and are more resilient,” says Simon Deeves, designer of the Pocket Planting ‘A Celebration of
Can refer to either home-made garden compost or seed/potting compost: • Garden compost is a soil improver made from decomposed plant waste, usually in a compost bin or heap. It is added to soil to improve its fertility, structure and water-holding capacity. Seed or potting composts are used for growing seedlings or plants in containers - a wide range of commercially produced peat-free composts are available, made from a mix of various ingredients, such as loam, composted bark, coir and sand, although you can mix your own.

Compost and Community’. “They retain their flowers for longer, and I love the variation in colour in the petals, with the flowers gradually turning deep rusty orange.

“They are perennial, but aren’t fully hardy, so need a mild climate, a sheltered spot or perhaps, in colder areas, to be grown in containers that can be brought in over winter. If you can get it through winter, it’ll keep coming back year after year with those gorgeous blooms whose tones so readily pick up tones in, or contrast with, other plants.”

In the Honing Heritage garden, Nick Leitch has created an electrifying complementary colour contrast by pairing Digitalis ‘Firecracker’ with deep cobalt-blue agapanthus and bright blue Eryngium.

Position: full sun or part shade
Soil: well-drained or moist but well-drained
Flowering period: June–September
Hardiness: borderline to half-hardy (to around –5°C)

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6. Malva moschata f. alba – white musk mallow

With almost the entire plant covered in pure white, satiny, saucer-shaped blooms that are backlit in the sunshine and bring gleaming radiance to dappled shade, this naturally occurring white form of our native musk mallow is hard to miss in the Electuary garden.

After pumping out silky flowers all summer and laying on an abundance of easily accessible pollen for bees, this hardy perennial will happily self-seed to create a larger colony for you to enjoy in years to come.

Position: full sun
Soil: well-drained or moist but well-drained
Flowering period: June–September
Hardiness: fully hardy

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7. Oryzopsis miliacea – smilo grass

“Everyone has been asking about this grass,” says designer Abigail Stoyle, who created the Silo: All that comes in remains garden. “It’s a tall, semi-evergreen species that’s great for deep shade. 80% of the plants in this garden are edible, and smilo grass is an ancient grain that was historically turned to as an emergency food source.”

Native to the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East, this drought-resistant grass has delicate, feathery flower panicles that add lightness and airiness to perennial planting, gleam a beautiful bronze in the sun, and persist all winter for sustained structure and interest.

Position: full sun
Soil: well-drained or moist but well-drained
Flowering period: June–February
Hardiness: fully hardy

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8. Elaeagnus multiflora – cherry silverberry

Tom Stuart-Smith has used four multistemmed specimens of Elaeagnus multiflora to being structure and shade to The Julia Rausing Garden. Providing a dense, elevated canopy of spear-shaped greyish leaves beneath which the planting can flow, cherry silverberry is an elegant choice for a small or medium garden.

“I like the slightly grey foliage in contrast with the glossy dark green of Osmanthus × fortunei, another tree I’ve used behind it,” says Tom. “It’s also a very elegant shape and very drought-tolerant.”

With a height and spread of 2–3m, cherry silverberry was also one of the top resilient trees used earlier this year at RHS Chelsea. Discover the others here.