The All About Plants gardens at the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show include an edible skate park, a garden for gut health and a tropical forest packed with rarely seen plants. Find out more about the six gardens featuring this year.
An edible skate park, growing for gut health and a tropical forest packed with rare and unusual plants are just some of the highlights in the six All About Plants gardens at the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
The All About Plants category was introduced in 2022 and champions ‘the positive power of plants to improve lives and livelihoods’. They have a focus on unusual and specialist plants, highlighting the vital role specialist growers play within UK horticulture, and will be located in the Great Pavilion.
Each garden has been designed in collaboration with a UK charity to reflect their individual causes. All of the All About Plants gardens are funded by Project Giving Back.
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show runs from Tuesday 21 to Saturday 25 May 2024. Here’s all you need to know about booking tickets for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2024.
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Chelsea 2024: The All About Plants gardens
Planet Good Earth Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting The Planet Good Earth CIC
Designer: Betongpark and Urban Organic
Featuring exclusively edible plants, the Planet Good Earth Garden by Betongpark & Urban Organic will see RHS Chelsea’s first edible skate park, with a two tonne granite skate ramp nestled among the planting. Created by a collection of skaters, parents and food growers, the garden highlights how fun outdoor learning in a natural setting can positively impact wellbeing and confidence in young people.
After the show, the garden will be relocated to Black Mountains College near Hay on Wye – a new education centre with a mission to promote ecological action. The garden will be the core of a new educational space that will house a kitchen garden, cafe and mixed-use hub for young people.
Bowel Research UK Microbiome Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Bowel Research UK
Designer: Chris Hull and Sid Hill
Taking a new approach to grow your own, the Bowel Research UK Microbiome Garden by ecological horticulturist, planting designer and consultant Sid Hill and Chris Hull champions growing for gut health. It offers a probiotic feast in the form of an edible wildflower meadow, in which sweet dock, lupins, and camassia feature heavily for their gut positive qualities. The garden explores the connection between soil health, plant life, and the human microbiome. A serpentine charred oak sculptural wall meanders through the space and around ‘The Hive’, a simple hexagonal shelter where people could gather to prepare food or take refuge from the elements.
The garden will be relocated to the Schumacher College in Devon after the show.
The Size of Wales Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting The Size of Wales
Designer: Daniel Bristow
Designer Daniel Bristow is moving away from the traditional planting palette usually seen at Chelsea. His Size of Wales garden is inspired by the abundance and diversity of life that occurs in the tropical forests of the world, and will feature 313 rarely seen plant species to reflect the number of tree species present in just one hectare of tropical forest. Plants include the moss-like carrot relative Azorella trifurcata along with the eyeballed pincushions of Leptinella ‘Country Park’ and the alien looking Rubus squarrosus.
The garden will live on and mature at Treborth Botanic Garden, North Wales, where it will be open to the public.
The Pulp Friction: Growing Skills Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Pulp Friction CIC
Designer: Will Dutch & Tin-Tin Azure-Marxen, Dutch Landscape Architects LTD
This forest garden takes as its model the most productive organic system in Britain – deciduous woodland. It consists of trees and shrubs, with bushes below and a ground layer of perennials beneath. All the plants are edible or useful and work together to support each other via soil improvement and shelter from the elements.
The central feature of the garden is a hoop constructed from recycled fire hoses donated by Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service. The circle below represents a place where everyone can come together.
After the show, the garden will be relocated to Bestwood, Nottingham to be used as a community garden.
The Panathlon Joy Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting The Panathlon Foundation
Designer: Penelope Walker
Award-winning garden designer Penelope Walker is working with Panathlon, the disability sports charity for young people, to create a colourful and uplifting garden that reflects how the charity inspires inclusion, enables accessibility and normalises difference. It will be the first wheelchair accessible All About Plants garden.
After the show, the garden will be relocated to the Marjorie McClure School in Chislehurst, a school for students aged 4-19 years old with complex medical needs and physical disabilities.
The Sue Ryder Grief Kind Garden
Sponsor: Project Giving Back supporting Sue Ryder
Designer: Katherine Holland
The Sue Ryder Grief Kind Garden designed by Katherine Holland will provide a peaceful sanctuary in which to be enveloped in the beauty of nature, while encouraging visitors to share their experiences of grief.
Katherine Holland previously collaborated with Sue Ryder at the RHS Hampton Court Garden Festival in 2022, winning an Silver Medal for the concept garden, “A Journey.” She will be drawing on her own experience of grief to emulate the type of green space she needed when she was bereaved. It will feature a range of sensory perennial plants and unusual specimen trees, including Heptacodium miconioides, Rhamnus asplenifolia and a multi-stemmed form of Tilia henryana.
Following the show, the garden will be relocated to Sue Ryder’s St John Hospice in Bedford. The garden takes inspiration from the area’s history in lace production, using some of the organic shapes from the famous Midlands ‘Bud’ lace to create the designs for the planting borders and the York stone paving.
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