Alice Vincent reflects on the attempts to address the gender divide at Chelsea Flower Show and what it means in real terms
Stride into the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year and you’ll see history among the flowers. Enormous plinths carry illustrated portraits of notable women from horticulture: plantswoman Beth Chatto, designer Gertrude Jekyll, writer Vita Sackville-West, botanist Janaki Ammal and campaigner Wangari Muta Maathai among them. These, we’re told, are “Heroines of Horticulture”: upheld this year by the RHS in an attempt to record the efforts of some of the women whose work has been hidden by patriarchal society over the decades.
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Chelsea’s monument has had a feminist takeover. Polly Wilkinson’s dreamy design, which leads off from the plinths, holds this fast in its very existence. Wilksinson has worked with all-female design and planting teams to usher her vibrant cottage planting from the ground up. From willow containers woven by Mollie McMillen of Field Farm rise specialist plants grown by women from Hare Spring Cottage Plants, Botanical Nursery and Claire Austin Hardy Plants.
The moment hasn’t gone unnoticed by the RHS itself, which has been proud to announce this year as the moment when there are more women designers at Chelsea than men for the first time ever: 58 per cent of the garden designers competing for a medal in 2023 define as female, more than double the 27 per cent a decade ago, and a notable improvement on the 45 per cent of last year.
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Look more closely, though, and the news isn’t as overwhelmingly positive. That majority sits only in two categories this year: the All About Plants gardens, located in the Pavilion, and the Balcony and Container gardens, tucked away in the woodland enclave of the showground, a considerable stumble from Main Avenue, where the gender divide remains deeply unequal with 11 male designers to four female. It’s a worse story in the Sanctuary Gardens, where men outnumber women designers three to one.
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What this means is that, aside from the giant plinths, men still hog the footfall at RHS Chelsea this year. It’s not that the Container and Balcony or All About Plants gardens aren’t worth looking at – I frequently find them the most regular source of useful, accessible ideas – but they take a dedicated effort to spot amid the limelight of the Show Gardens.
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Speaking of the Show Gardens, three of the four exhibiting female designers – Ji-hae Hwang, Sarah Price, Charlotte Harris (co-designing with Hugo Bugg on the Best In Show Horatio’s Garden) – won Gold for their designs, with Jilayne Rickards taking home Silver for her Flora & Fauna garden. It goes without saying that women designers are capable of delivering a showstopping garden; that we are still so poorly represented in the arena where they are best-seen remains the bigger mystery.
And those are the named women involved in Chelsea. Every year, women outnumber men in volunteering to plant up gardens that attract tens of thousands of paying attendees. They are called volunteers because they are frequently not paid. Landscapers, who are mostly male, are. These gardens are literally built by unpaid female labour. In that context, celebrating the work of horticultural women from history feels a little awkward.
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Chelsea is making things easier for women in smaller, somewhat overdue ways. This year, for instance, is the first that infants are allowed into the showground providing they are in a sling or arms (no prams or buggies), enabling people like me – a working mother of a baby – to attend the show without having to pay for childcare to do so (children over five are also allowed in). This, though, hasn’t been as widely advertised as the gender divide, with the official line being that bringing babies in arms “is discouraged due to the unsuitable nature of the environment”. It still feels a bit like I’m sneaking a contraband baby into the place.
I ask Wilkinson, who won Silver and the People’s Choice Award at Chelsea last year for her Mothers for Mothers Garden, whether it feels different this year. “It’s fabulous to have the opportunity to uphold women gardeners,” she says, “but I’m looking forward to the day when there are equal or more women than men on Main Avenue. I’m looking forward to the day when we don’t have to make a fuss about it at all.”
Fudging the figures about the gender divide at Chelsea will only slow the progress needed to make representation equal, because if we don’t shout about the extent of the problem, it’s harder to acknowledge that there is one. It’s fantastic that women are leading those starting their Chelsea journeys in the Balcony and Container Gardens – perhaps this is the beginning of a more equal Main Avenue. But female designers are more than capable of taking on those bigger plots. Here’s hoping we’ll see more of them doing so next year.
Alice Vincent is the author of Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival (£16.99)