I have mixed feelings about the RHS Chelsea Flower Show; and, in truth, about all flower and garden shows.
On one hand, their inherent wastefulness and ultra-short-termism sit uneasily with me. Entire landscapes are designed, constructed, planted, photographed, celebrated, dismantled, and dispersed within the space of a few days. Gardens that appear timeless are, in reality, intensely temporary. For someone whose work is rooted in stewardship, longevity, and the evolving life of a garden over time, there is something fundamentally uncomfortable about that.
And yet, despite all of that, a large part of me still deeply wants to participate. I want the challenge of designing and building a show garden. I want to test myself creatively and practically against the constraints, pressures, and opportunities that come with it. There is also no denying that shows like Chelsea Flower Show are extraordinary platforms for designers, landscapers, growers, and craftspeople. To exhibit there is to place your work in front of an enormous audience. It is celebration, theatre, competition, and marketing all at once.
More than that, garden shows are genuinely inspiring places to visit. Within a relatively small and tightly bounded area, you encounter an extraordinary concentration of creative expression. They are spaces full of ideas to admire, question, critique, and ultimately borrow from. Few environments offer such an intense immersion in horticultural and spatial creativity.
But I also find myself wishing they were more adventurous.
To my eye, many show gardens (despite obvious differences in layout, materials, planting palettes, and detailing) often end up feeling strangely similar. If you blur your eyes slightly, the distinctions begin to collapse into a recognisable aesthetic language: carefully composed naturalism, restrained luxury, atmospheric planting, muted materials, a prescribed sense of “good taste.” Beautiful, certainly. But rarely surprising. Rarely radical.
I suspect there are many reasons for this. Perhaps the judging criteria and the pursuit of the coveted Gold medal naturally encourage designers toward a relatively narrow interpretation of excellence. Or perhaps it reflects the wider cultural moment we are in; one shaped heavily by social media, which often seems to reward homogenisation more than divergence. You can see this phenomenon elsewhere too, such as in the way platforms like Airbnb have subtly flattened interior design into a globally recognisable aesthetic. Garden design may be experiencing something similar.
What I really wish existed in the UK was a different kind of garden festival altogether. Something less like a week-long spectacle of pomp, corporate hospitality, trade stands, and flower launches, and more closely connected to the actual life of gardens.
In France, for example, the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire runs from spring through to autumn — roughly six months. That changes the entire proposition for designers. Instead of creating a garden that peaks for one week in May, you must create something capable of evolving beautifully over time. Plants are allowed to move through their natural cycles. The garden can mature, soften, decline, and regenerate. It becomes less about instant-impact “wow factor” and more about seasonality, change, and endurance; which is to say, more about the reality of gardening itself.
I recently came across an idea for an even better model; a travelling garden festival that leaves permanent public gardens behind. Imagine if each year the event took place in a town or urban area in need of renewal, and part of the brief was to create a small number of lasting public spaces. Gardens not as temporary stage sets, but as enduring civic contributions. Places people could continue to inhabit and enjoy long after the crowds and cameras had gone. That feels far more aligned with the deeper purpose of gardens.
One of the strange things about shows like Chelsea Flower Show is how detached they can become from ordinary gardening. Visitors rarely realise how heavily controlled these environments are; how plants are forced into flower for a precise moment, or cultivated under highly artificial conditions to achieve perfection on schedule. People then go home, buy the same plants, try to recreate what they saw, and often feel disappointed when reality fails to match the spectacle.
And still, despite all these reservations, I cannot deny the pull of it. Garden shows remain thrilling. They are celebrations of an industry and culture I genuinely love. And in truth, I’m fine living with that contradiction. It is entirely possible to critique something while also wanting to participate in it.
I fully intend to apply for a show garden in the future. And if I’m fortunate enough to create one, I would want it to remain as faithful as possible to the principles that underpin my wider practice: longevity, material honesty, stewardship, and the realities of how gardens actually live over time.
For now, Chelsea Flower Show is on this week, and I’ll be visiting on Thursday. Whatever my criticisms, I know I’ll leave inspired; full of ideas, full of admiration for the skill on display, and eager to get on with creating gardens of my own.
Dale Walker 